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 Apple Crisp and Comfort

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God… 2 Corinithians 1

I stand in the kitchen and peel apples. Slice them up and put them to bed with butter, cinnamon, sugar.

Outside it is dark and cold. In the kitchen it is quiet, and I am alone.

Two years ago, in late winter my sister died; it was nearly spring when we buried her. But it’s when summer dwindles and the leaves begin to golden, this is when I catch the ache rising in my throat. After all, it was in fall, that year, that I really began to unravel.

I see now that this was a carefully timed gift: that the soul-thawing happened then, while the leaves danced their way to death, their going down to decay all laden with glory.

Everyday at school pick-up I see a dad who once wrote something kind about my sister; everyday, picking up his son. I wonder how he knew her. I stop cutting apples, get lost in the weight of it, let it pull me right down to the usual-sticky, now cinnamon-dusted tile.

This whole world is replete with joy and grief; a simple tension-setting holds this precious commodity of life.

Down here, I remember the gift of getting low. I think about that fall two years ago that marked the end of my good show. I suspect no one but me was really surprised to discover my soul was bare as winter branches.

There’s nothing glorious about a crying woman in a messy kitchen with a half-made apple crisp, and perhaps sticky tiles hold more plain reality than metaphor. But there’s something very good about coming to the end of yourself, admitting how much you need the grace you measure and pour and serve.

It was against the backdrop of that hard fall, two years ago, when hope dwindled and all the good truth I’d built my world around began to ring hollow, that I discovered I was in need. The ugly judgement and shaky trust-less-ness in the foundations of my soul were exposed.

It’s been two autumns, two hard and good years, and my heart has healed a bit, is healing. I thank Jesus for time and therapy and a husband who really hears me, for old hymns and watercolor paint, for a sweet community and even the space to spill words here. These things have been mercy, and hope is growing, slow and sure. I could hum all day of the Redeemer, faithful even when I could see no light at all. I could and I do.

But if blessed are the hungry and the poor and the meek and the weepers, how does one hold high the banner of healing and wholeness while keeping her heart vulnerable and surrendered? I don’t want to stay in the cold bathwater of grief, but I cannot afford to live like I am not in desperate need, hopelessly broken but for the grace of God.

But for the grace of God.

I wipe away the cinnamon, and for days I feast on little glass bowls comfort, a perfect apple crisp, my mother’s recipe. Everywhere I go golden leaves cascade, go low to make soil fertile through their death.

This whole world is replete with joy and grief; a simple tension-setting holds this precious commodity of life.

Today I will make another apple crisp. Friends will gather after kids are tucked in and we will eat it hot out of the oven, together. We will speak and we will listen, share the fruit of this grief and a hot mug of comfort.

Comfort. It will season the conversations with the ones I love, hold the tears and the silence, let the laughter roll out right alongside sorrow. It is teaching me to go listen, to go low, to see again.

Indeed, in our hearts we felt the sentence of death. But this happened that we might not rely on ourselves but on God, who raises the dead. He has delivered us from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us. On him we have set our hope that he will continue to deliver us… 2 Corinthians 1

Of Sunflowers and Silk Scarves

In April our littlest planted twelve sunflower seeds.

One grew.

And grew. And grew. And grew.

An August gale laid low that tall green stalk, ripped the rose lattice right off the porch too. But still, she grew. And in early October, right when the temperature slipped into a cable-knit and scarf, it bloomed.

When I roll out of bed this morning, I remember that I’m meeting a friend at school drop-off. We plan to walk, you know, to exercise: I wish I’d put it off another day. I put on walking clothes, don’t notice the gentle rain til we’re already out the door. By the time we arrive at school my friend is already home with her baby.

I could walk anyway, in the rain, but I go home and pour coffee instead. Swap yoga paints for the only jeans that fit, don my chunky beige cable-knit, because when I discovered these words, that cable-knit became an icon. And I gather comfort from the echo of those words and the sweater itself all the cold, long day.

At the top of the stairs, the scarf is hanging like art off the banister.  It’s the orange one that everyone calls red, because it’s that vibrant; an anniversary gift on our second year, from the man who’s loved me nine.  It’s distinctly autumnal, and every fall it brings me back to the farm where we danced and laughed loud on our wedding day. It whispers of the years his arms have held me.

It’s big enough to be a blanket. I wrap it around my neck and let it blanket me.  It encircled this body before I carried babies, served as an impromptu sling, and a nursing cover before you could buy them in stores. All day long, I’m wrapped in memories.

We walk through the rain to the library, drive to town to pick up my next read for book club. In the afternoon I drink tea. I start to write again after a good, little quiet spell. My sister invites us for dinner, and we gladly go, forgetting the salad at home. Let’s not even mention the artisan bread fail.

I could say I don’t usually care much about clothes, but the reject piles that litter the bedroom floor when I’m running late for church would say otherwise. And when I read these honest words last week,  I remembered that my body is a temple. Today I have dressed for the day I long for, planted simple seeds of desire in the form of 100% Acrylic cable-knit and pure silk in almost-red-orange.

I have been wrapped in love and quiet comfort today. I’ve been wrapped in it all along, you know. And I will grow into it.

And grow. And grow. And grow.

Head over to Dear Abby Leigh to read the rest of the lovely #dressfortheday posts.

On Holding On & Letting Go

Today I read words written by beautiful souls, about the hard-won holding tight, the resolute standing firm. And I read about the open palms, letting go, sweet and scary sacred surrender.

I think of my babies, nursing. The dance of their tiny fingers in constant cycle of motion: grasp, clench, release, twirl. Little lips drink as little hands keep time on collars and cardigans, silky blanket corners and the soft skin that wraps round my strong arms. Their little hands creating a quiet rhythm, echoing the tide of nourishment.

And I have sunk into the slow decent of surrender, and also fought hard to hold on to love, to promises penned in ancient, breathing words. This week I stood beside the grave of a woman whose life was marked by gritty, wild love. Her daughter is a sister to me, and bears her image. How to hold on, how to let go…

Who can chart these seasons of grasping tight and unclenching fists? Certainly it is not ours to prescribe.

No, only the one from whom flows life. There is a rhythm from the deep flow that enters silent, milk from a mother’s breast.

I have no baby to nurse now. Both are weaned, but still, their small fingers gather corners of blankets, fall into sleep with silent memory motion: grasp, clench, release, twirl.

This post is inspired by Lisa-Jo Baker and the Five Minute Friday community, who invites me & you to write for five unedited minutes: “For fun, for love of the sound of words, for play, for delight, for joy and celebration at the art of communication. For only five short, bold, beautiful minutes. Unscripted and unedited. We just write without worrying if it’s just right or not.” -Lisa-Jo. This week’s word: GRASP.

Let Love

Everything’s turned golden outside. It’s too cold for wide open windows, but I put on a sweater and let wind whip through this dusty old house anyway. Welcome it in, just the same as pockets full of acorns, handfuls of dying leaves crammed into glass jars. Autumn feels fragile this year.

When I check the news, the tide of this grief stricken orb threatens my gravity. A bleeding world, full of politics and unnatural disasters, famine and wars and rumors of wars: it’s every bit as broken as all its broken tenants. The temperature’s dropping and I remember that in those days the love of many will grow cold.

This last week I waited from far too many miles away as two women on opposite ends of the country, two sisters whom I love, walked right into the valley of the shadow, embraced deepest sorrow with a kind of grace and gritty honesty I cannot comprehend.

If the simple graces set the table for thanksgiving, it’s the heartache and grief that drive me out to the well.

And it was just two words whispered like living water, a two-word lullaby whirling round my soul: day in, day out, all week. It hums til I let pigment bleed onto parchment, words seep into skin: Let love.
Let love.

Let it tuck the covers tight, and pour the tea, and sit still, fully present.

Let love.

Let it nourish the hungry, lonely places.

Let love.

Let it fill the widening crevices of frustration; let it speak peace to the heart strangled by worry, the one that judges.

Let love.

Let it bend that back lower, expose the gifts of small and broken.

Let love.

Let it melt the frozen and forgotten places, where the wild dancing has gradually slowed to solid ice while no one was looking.

Let love.

Let it wash over those multitudes, the harsh words, the friendly fire. Unclench those fists.

Let love.

Let it open the front door to the friend all shut up in her own head, let it linger on the couch til words come. Let it set another plate, wash the next load of laundry.

Let love.

Let it quiet the voices of should and not good enough. Let it silence shame and bring light to places desperate for redemption, restoration, conviction. Let it come gentle in the long, quiet.

Let love.

Let is scream wild truth to send ugly lies packing. Rinse and repeat.

Let love.

Let it break that hard heart into a million little pieces.

Let love.

Let it bind up. And let it build up. Let it stitch together the broken into quilts of comfort and mercy.

Let love.

Let it hang onto threads of hope, choose joy again and again and again.

Let love.

All golden day long, and into the dark night.

Let love.

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Is love seeping into your life, in the hard places or the sweet nothings? I’d love to hear.
{For a limited time, you can find this print “Let Love” available in my Etsy shop.}

Dear Me {a Graceful post}

Today I’m joining Emily P. Freeman and others to celebrate the release of her book, Graceful, by writing a letter to my sixteen year old self. I’ve read Emily’s first book, and have a feeling I’ll love this one too. You can learn more and see the beautiful trailer here.

Oh, Annie Banannie.

If I could go back in time and hand you this letter, deliver it at your dramatically bemoaned sixteenth birthday, there would be just one thing I’d tell you. Because if I told you much – about Africa or heartache or the good, strong man you’ll marry, if I told you about a sister buried already, or how you’ll move back to the one zip code you swore you never would – your sweet little head might just explode. So let’s keep this simple.
Sometime right around now, you’re going to spend half an hour talking to a woman on your best friend’s back porch. At a party. And after a while, your friend, who knows you so well, will pop her head out, tell you that her aunt is deaf and only reads lips in Italian. You’ll linger a little while anyway.

And the reality that you could easily spend half an hour talking to someone without even perceiving that she doesn’t speak your language, hear your words, won’t set in for years. You could learn a lot from that woman.

A decade and a half later, you still love to talk. And write. But, self, if I could tuck one secret into the back pocket of those Gap jeans you stole from your sister’s closet, it would be this:

Learn to listen.

Listen to the ones who love you most. Listen for the love, because it’s deeper and wider than you can grasp.

And listen to that quiet girl on the bus.

Listen for the stories that require silence as a prologue.

Listen to conversations you have nothing to add to. Presence is an art, too.

Listen for the words that don’t come easy, the ones that don’t come at all.

Listen in silence.

Listen to the Word.

And listen to the world – all its wild beauty and heartache and brokenness.

Then listen to the Word some more.

And oh, listen to your own heart. Not the shiny, bright one you wear on your sleeve and collect imaginary Pioneer Girl badges for. Not the one that draws illustrated lists of ideal qualities in a husband. (Hint: He won’t play the guitar, but he will love you, patient and fierce.) Listen to the lonely, hard places you’re so desperately afraid of – the places you try to cover up with wordiness, sarcasm, competition, and all-around attempts at awesomeness. Don’t let those whispers cement in your heart; let them into the Light. You won’t get your badges taken away, promise.

And if you’re quiet, oh Annie, if you’re quiet, you’ll realize who it is that’s truly hearing impaired, dear one. You will hear what we’re all sin-sick and deaf to, desperately trying to decipher on the lips of every  moment:

You’ll hear grace, girl.

A thousand times over.

Grace.

Grace.

Grace.

In the beauty and the heartache and the tensions: grace. In the mysteries and the waiting and the simple, unchanging truths: grace. And, girl, you don’t know how bad you need the grace you evangelize everyone about. It will set you free; it is setting you free.

So blow out your candles and swim with your friends, live it up in your quirky, sentimental way: go on and sing “I am sixteen, going on seventeen” every day this year, for fear you’ll never be able to sing it truthfully ever, ever again.

And then go ask your sister how she’s doing. Listen to your grandmother’s story about the bikini that went missing in the Delaware river, because soon enough she’ll loose those stories the same way she lost her skinny-dipping sister’s swimsuit. Listen to the ruckus of a house full of voices you’ve heard every day of your life, and listen to the quiet stillness in the night, the peepers croaking in the back woods. Listen to — oh, right… ahem… I’ll quiet down now.

Thank you for grace,
Annie

{What would you say to your sixteen year old self? I’d love to hear. Or if you blog, write a post and link up tomorrow at Chatting at the Sky. Also, if my eighty-six year old self is out there, could you drop me a line? I’ve got a few questions here. Thanks.}

Sunday Stops & Monday Living

Some days, we stop.

We stop, Sunday.

We stop in the liturgy for quiet, and we stop to pass the peace.

Before we leave church, I stop and hold heavy words, silent tears from an aching heart.

We take a drive, stop on the side of road to soak in the September sky.

We stop and savor local-grown goodness at our favorite lunch place, marvel at purple bursting from blue potato fries from fields around the corner.

I stop by the kitchen sink to listen to the sound of your voice reading to our girls, their laughter echoing back.

Quiet and gratitude and rest pour cold buckets of life to extinguish all that threatens to burn and break.

A long day of lingering stops fills my cup: I drink down courage to start the week.

It’s only ten in the morning when I let peace slip right through my fingers.

Because some days I go.

I Go. Go. Go. Go. Go; crazy.

Busy feeds the fire, fanned by frenzy and I’m found smoldering.

Some days I let the shoulds and the coulds consume me: they beat me up from the inside, like a gentle wind straight to the center of the fire: whisper-singing the nagging narrative of failure; keeping me grounded in the ashes of self,  instead of staying planted in cool, wet soil of the was and is and ever more shall be.

And when you come to me, tired and ragged, I speak criticism rather than courage. I defend, you retort, and we dance circles around the flames. We know better, but we add dead wood to the fire anyway. It’s hard to let it die down, kill it with patience and cold buckets of Living Water.

So at half past eleven I return to the Well, brittle and burned, clothed in the same-old smoke-stench.

“For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do…

…So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members…

…Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God – through Jesus Christ our Lord…

…Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus…” Romans 8

Cold water fresh on my lips, I wonder why I ever let this body dehydrate, my soul grow parched.

And in the middle of the night, in the crook of your sleeping neck, when my tired head rises and falls against your chest, I cannot imagine speaking harsh, terse words to your steady beating soul. But I will.

Sunday, I imagine a week filled with rest notes and soul-quenching rhythm. But come Monday morning, grace sounds more like the hiss of cold water extinguishing flames: hiss, sizzle, and the long sigh of steam: living water taking flight.

It’s a jarring awakening to my desperate condition, antiseptic in a burn wound that stings and heals and heeds me to soak in the steam and abide on the shores of mercy, run fingers in the ripples of soul-rest minute by ordinary minute.

You call on your way to work and we stumble for the millionth time through awkward sorry-filled words, speak unglamorous truth, fall into forgiveness.  The flames die down a bit. I hang up the phone, get out the peanut butter and jelly, the sippy cups, and run the faucet til the water turns icy.

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…}

Summer’s End

I take the long way home, and wildflowers line the bending road: yellow, purple, cornflower blue, lacey white. Every year, a final parting gift of summer.

We just finished Charlotte’s Web, for the third time. The chapter on crickets ought to be read every August, I think. I hear them outside even now, in the middle of the night, singing their sad song of summer dying. And Charlotte dies. Alone. I read it through tears.

My eldest is going to kindergarten. Someone else I love is heartbroken. This week has been hard, and I have been held. There is ache and beauty all around, too much for me to bear or make sense of, much less weave into poetry.

Sometimes it feels like the world’s about to split in two, or maybe just this feeble heart. Everything’s dying, everything’s being made new. Wildflowers bloom. It’s the end of August.

This post is inspired by Lisa-Jo, who invites me & you to write for five unedited minutes: “On Fridays over here a group of people who love to throw caution to the wind and just write gather to share what five minutes buys them. Just five minutes. Unscripted. Unedited. Real..” -Lisa-Jo  ***This week’s word: change.***

Living Hymns: A Tribute

Up on a mountain, in southern California, my husband, and his father, and his father’s father sit, lined up in the first pew.  I run my fingers across the back of the man I love, and watch his parents’ fingers intertwine, knuckles whitening when tears flow. But Grandpa, surrounded on every side by children and grandchildren, sits alone, for once.

The pastor’s wife stands up and says Grandma’s life was a living hymn.
I meet her sisters for the first time; they are every bit as radiant as she was. We listen, cry, laugh, remember. Again and again we recall the sound of her whooping laughter, and the frequency of it around dinner tables and in surgical rooms, occasionally overheard behind a closed  bedroom door. Sixty-eight years of marriage; seventy-four years of faithful love, if you count the six she waited for him to finish medical school. Decades of service. Six children who are among the finest people I know, anywhere.

Grandpa stands up, shares how the two of them fell asleep singing hymns each night, closing the day with aged harmony lilting The Love of God into the quiet darkness. He sang her right into glory, held her tenderly in his arms and whispered in her ear til she breathed her last. We all sing together:

Could we with ink the ocean fill,
And were the skies of parchment made,
Were every stalk on earth a quill,
And every man a scribe by trade,
To write the love of God above,
Would drain the ocean dry.
Nor could the scroll contain the whole,
Though stretched from sky to sky.

A living hymn: so much joy, such faithfulness; low notes and sweet melodies sweetly sung over generations and continents.

Our eldest, Laura, bears her name, but all the letters we have treasured here are simply signed Grandma or GG-ma. She ended each with the same words that hung framed above her bed, the Word that sang from the hard and lonely places and sun-scaped alps of her long life:

“Rejoice in the Lord always.” Philippians 4:4.

I look at Grandpa, and the six grown children who bear the imprint of her love and the sacrifice of her service. And my heart aches for my little ones at home, for all the places that death and distance separate mothers and sisters, lovers and beloveds; all the brokenness that stifles life this side of heaven. Grandpa looks down at his hands, and my tears fall for all the beauty of this one life.

We return from California and pick up the girls at my parents.  At breakfast, I open my old hymn book and begin to teach the girls The Love of God, whisper a prayer that my life will sing it until last breath.