For me, church was wood paneling and white brick, tall narrow windows and pews with crosses etched into them.  I can still smell the expanse of that place as if it lived in me for my almost 40 years. Church was familiar faces, choir robes, signing the blue guest booklet, being asked to sing ‘Living for Jesus’ with my cousin Autumn, stacking little plastic communion cups of grape juice, singing out of the hymnal, and drawing a picture of my grandpa while he preached.  And, miracurously, I am an early millennial who owns these things deep down, incredibly deep and protected in my soul.

Of course, I didn’t know I was millenial.  I was just a kid born at the end of 1981 who was raised on Steve Green and Great is Thy Faithfulness, the earliest generation of children who grew up with computers, Star Wars, and Inspector Gadget but with a grasp on the old way of life…a foot in two separate worlds as a child. I can very tangibly feel the old life versus the progressive.  I am a container of these two normalities of culture into one anomaly.

Forming me into a child who loved my histories and classics with abandon, connecting me to the greats, but utilizing the future, a nostalgic user of social media.

Again, church was wandering up to the balcony and opening the door to the tiny closet of a sound room where the services were recorded and my dad would let me sit with him to record if I didn’t touch anything.   It was touching the covers of all the books in Alice Smith’s church library across from Grandpa’s office and checking several out every week.

Church was my mom telling us to quiet down and my dad rubbing my arm, humming to the sound of the organ.  It was my dad being the last one to leave after shutting off every light and locking every door while my grandpa shook everyone’s hands with his soft, tender smile of compassion.

Most of the cassette tapes of my grandpa’s decades of sermons are lost.

It was hearing about my grandpa’s plane crash in Papua New Guinea, or his belongings stolen out of the trunk of a car in Paris, or wondering if he was safe in the jungles of Togo.  It was hearing his tender stories of the people in those places, touching the 5×7 print pictures of natives in those countries and feeling like it was so very far away.  It was begging God He wouldn’t send me far, far away.

It was living up to the suffocating expectations of a pastor’s family, even when the pastor and the family are more grace filled and forgiving. It was caving under the pressure and begging to be let out and then being welcomed back in and embracing every difficulty, every sadness, every pressure, every memory.

Church was eating my grandma’s pot roast after morning service some Sundays, tramping through the treeline that bordered my grandparent’s backyard, playing wiffle ball, and peeking into the den to find my uncle Paul napping while the baseball game flickered on the television.  The Sundays we didn’t go to grandma and grandpa’s we pulled up to the HotnNow drive-thru on Westnedge next to the Putt-Putt, ordering twelve cheeseburgers to take home. It was every Sunday, all day, every Wednesday, every weekend, every summer full of VBS day camp, sleep away camp up North, youth group road trips and missions trips and evangelism.  It was all around me and through me.

It was being everything for all people, as the Apostle Paul says.

Church was sitting with my cousins, being dunked in a bathtub full of warm water, wandering potluck tables, and knowing very deeply in my subconscious that my family was collectively rooted down into church community like the brick foundation of the building, like being chained down into Michigan Avenue and the city my family was planted in a hundred years before.  When I was fifteen I wanted to run far away from it.  Two years later, I embraced the Father as the prodigal.

We talk of our places of being, such as being American, or a Texan, a Virginian, an Alaskan, or a graduate of our alma mater.  A firefighter, a librarian, a teacher, a stockbroker, a lawyer, a doctor, a clerk.  I can list many things that I am or was, but if I go back far enough and deep enough, I was born Christian, in a household of faith as we call it.  I knew deep in my rebellious soul all those years ago that I could never escape it.

He has not lost one of those given to Him.

So while church was all of these tangible things, it was more than them, too.

It has been many years since I’ve stepped foot back into the church where I was born, baptized, raised, graduated, married, brought my children, and remembered my grandfather at his passing and the people came to see him.  There is something about that building that makes me feel like I recognize myself when I’m there.

I recited Bible verses and played my oboe there, I sang Pachelbel’s Cannon in D and Lo How a Rose Er Blooming. I sat in the prayer rooms behind the baptismal and pushed on the footpedals of the organ and sat under my grandpa’s desk and smelled diesel while cleaning out the blue bus.  It’s probably been almost fifteen years since I’ve sat through a Baptist service there.  And why?

Well.

The church I grew up in is gone.

And that’s painful.

Jesus tells us to love people, and my grandpa joked once that feeding His sheep was difficult at times, because sheep can be stinky.  People hurt one another and disagree, and then they pray together and can shake hands and live through the years of life side by side.

But I am a person of place and tradition.

I can remember sitting on the lakeshore sand in my early twenties, shifting it through my fingers to remember every July of my childhood wash over me as it slipped from my palm and I looked out over the clear water of Lake Michigan from Whitefish Bay.  I carry the smell of the cottage as if I was walking through the door right now.  I can feel my thighs shifting against eachother with grit from that lakeshore sand and jumping to the rocks and crashing into the waves with my brother and my cousins, the same way my dad and my uncles and their cousins did before us.  My grandmother walked through that cottage and her presence filled that space.   I remember the summer my uncles took us hiking through the Door peninsula picking wild strawberries and teaching us songs.

I ran my hands over the brick of the church that was built up around me, and I left it after 20 years.  Dana Arledge sat dumbfounded when my husband and I came to him asking to join, at 23 years old, the even older Bethel Baptist…the church that founded Berean.  We were looking for something familiar and solid under our feet that we could remember.

And I read Steinbeck and Dostyevstky and Lewis and Hemingway and Tolstoy and Dickens and Austen and so many.  So Many.  There, that was comfort to remember place.

…

When I stepped into a liturgical service for the first time ten years later, I cried.

I was washed and I wept. My emotion and heart finally erupted, something I was seeking, missing, and knew deep within my spirit, but no longer existed in modern America.

Yet, there it was, solace in the midst. It is why I am now Anglican and kneeled before a priest for confirmation. It is why my son was baptised as an infant.

Only this past Sunday, in that stained glass chapel, we sang from the hymnal and I inhaled ‘He Leadeth Me’ on cello, violin, and piano.  A lamentation of my short years that I breathe deeply and know astutely.

Now I understand my grandpa was truly half Baptist, half Anglican. He married us all from the Book of Common Prayer.  He read the Eucharist from 1 Corinthians.  It is why I feel so completely at home in both.

I took my upbringing for granted, really.  While many of my Baptist contemporaries remember their childhoods laced with large doses of legalism, what I remember is people trying to make sense of life with God.

The way of a pastor’s family is that of prayer, and understanding, and above all, taking on other’s cares into their being.

Months ago I told my grandmother this….I am thankful for the church I was purposed to grow in, for it has birthed me into revival. It gave me a compass for what to stay true to.

There is Word and Truth.

There is the Creed.

There is the Baptism.

There are the hymns.

There is the stained glass beauty of the chapel.

There are the people.

 

For Christmas I received a gift certificate to a local book shop from a student.

Think of it.

This was not a plastic, credit card shaped rectangle that could be thrown into a shopping cart along with milk and toilet paper at the local grocery store.  (If that is how you shop for teacher gifts, I am not judging you.  That’s how I shop for gifts in this season of my life, and I know how precious a commodity time is.)  It was an actual paper certificate that was signed in ink by one of the store clerks for a twenty-five dollar value.  Someone had to go into the store and request it at the counter.  This was precious.

I have spent countless hours scouring bookstores in my lifetime.  I like to run my fingers over book spines like they will imbibe a sort of energy into me, or vice versa, and to smell their pages before purchasing.  I have been a book smeller since I first smelt the glorious fragrance of my mom’s childhood copy of Skip after sitting in a box in the basement, gathering a patina of must, moisture, and age over years.  Skip is the story about a dog, and this particular copy was printed in the seventies with a yellow and orange watercolor background, though I never read it because I was not an animal lover like she was.  However, a secondary book that I pulled from that box was her copy of 101 Dalmatians.   (Anyone sensing the dog theme of my mother’s youth?) I read that book and loved it purely because it had lost its dear little cover and the first pages were filled with ink drawings of dogs walking in the park with their look-alike owners among pruned trees.

Not all books live up to this fine age.  Certain books have that horrid smell of a chemical laser printer.  There is a difference between book smells that renders them good or bad.  I’ve categorized the good ones down to four: forgotten library dry, basement hoarder musty, dark corner brittle, and freshly printed ink.  I’ve thought entirely too much about the smell of books.  I would buy a perfume called “Book Smell”.

Can I patent that?

Back to the point.  I’ve spent a lot of time in bookstores.  I’ve purchased quite a few books but not as many as you might think, because I’m carefully selective.  There may be reasons for this, like how I treat books like loyal friends verses mere aquaintances, but it is mainly due to the fact that I am not wealthy.  Of course, I have the ability to max out my credit card on books and build a pretty stellar library in the cabin level of my home.  However, I am much too practical and responsible for that, as much as I would love the instant gratification of such a room.

(Sidebar confession: I look at homes for sale based on the acreage of the lot and two story library.)

In being selective of what books I actually buy, nothing hurts me more than to spend $100 on a textbook that I have to slog through.  That’s at least four, if not five, brand new hardcover releases or special edition classics.  That’s ten to fifteen classic novels printed by Dover or Signet.  Oh, the pain.  The unsufferable agony.

I’ve always been a classics girl, quite skeptical of new books on the proverbial block.  Like, where did they come from?  Who do they think they are?  Prove your worth to me, you newbies.

I know, I know.  The classics were new releases once themselves and sold very well at some point, which is why they are, well, classics.  I wouldn’t have my beloved classics without new releases.  Nevertheless, I am an old soul at heart and therefore, the language and the atmostphere of the classics is like being home.

I’d like to know why that is.  Why do I feel at home with a book that is at least over fifty years old?  Why, when I was young, did I wish that I grew up during the time of the Titanic? The Civil War? Edwardian England? What influenced what?  Was I changed by the books or was I drawn to the books because of who I was?

Moving on.

I took my lovely gift certificate, neatly tucked into my lightweight backback, ready to splurge on a new, hardcover book.  I was going to step out of my comfort zone and purchase something recent.  I was clothed with brazen zeal and motivation, like Don Quioxte riding into misadventure. I spend about forty-five minutes perusing and while I picked up a five dollar copy of Austen’s Persuasion, I could not decide on a hardcover book over twenty dollars.  I picked up several, felt spines, and inhaled pages…my usual custom.  I carried around a couple, put them back.  I held Persuasion until the bitter end.  Apparently, five dollars is nothing for me to spend on a book; it’s practically loose change — free, no sacrifice.

But fifteen?  That’s painful unless absolutely doubtless.  Twenty-eight to thirty-two dollars, the average price of a new release on my estimate, is like piercing my heart with a double bladed dagger.  What if I were to spend my entire gift certificate with the store clerk’s personal signature on it on a gamble…on a new release which hasn’t been fully reviewed and vetted as gold?  What if I buy it and hate it?  I know that you all have read the introduction and maybe a chapter or two of numerous stacks of books on the nightstand or coffee table like I have, and we never finish them do we? All because of time or boredom or some other reason.  I did not want this gift certificate to purchase one of those risky books.

Instead, I returned Persuasion to it’s proper place next to Pride and Prejudice and left with nothing, informing my husband I couldn’t decide which book to buy, because I know I can check out Austen at my school library any time I wish.  I had found plenty of books that caught my eye, sounded interesting, or would inform me in ways that would be beneficial.  But were they truly worth the beloved gift certificate?

If you only had twenty five dollars to spend on books for an entire year, what would you decide on?  How would you decide?  Would you impulsively buy a best seller with the click of your touchscreen on Amazon or a new release with its attractive, glossy jacket?  Would you buy a few cheap paperbacks?  Would you splurge on a nicer copy of one of your favorite novels, with a cloth and board cover?  Would you find a used book store to shop?  When I am unsure of what I really want, I go and check out twenty books at the library, drag them home in a laundry basket, and palm each one, feel the page thickness between my fingertips, inhale the guts of the thing like a fine cigar, read the first few pages, and decide if I’m committed.

I mean, would I love this book?  Would I marry it? Would I die for it? (I’m only half joking…remember that saying, ‘If you love it so much, why don’t you marry it?’)  Or I sit in the corner on the floor and my legs crisscrossed in the library until I decide what to drag home and possibly, if I love it beyond all comprehension, buy my own copy to reread and reread again.

Which begs the question…do you reread books?  Novels?  Nonfiction?  Do you reread poetry?  Theology?  Philosophy?  Myth?  Science?

What exactly do you reread?  For those books that you reread tell who you are.

I don’t reread nearly as much as I want to.  Well, that’s not true.  I tell myself I like the idea of rereading and knowing a book inside and out, cover to cover, chapter by chapter, but the only books that I know that well are the books I teach every year.  Do you know how many times I’ve read Dicken’s A Christmas Carol by this point? I’ve lost count but has to be over ten times, which is a lot to read one book, if you really think about it.  Likewise for Anne of Green Gables and The Hiding Place.  The only other book that comes close to being reread that much without having taught it is To Kill a Mockingbird. If I’m not teaching a book, I tell myself I do not have the time to reread it, because there are so many books that I haven’t read yet and want to.  But it is a discipline just like anything else. I have to force myself to reread books in order to savor them the way that I want to.

This goes for writing, too.  I have to fight to sit down and work intellectually if I don’t have a deadline to meet.  I’m a wife, a mother to three children of differing ages and needs, vacuuming up after our 140 pound mastiff, driving to the horse barn at least four plus times per week, teaching full time as a middle school classical instructor while simultaneously

helping my daughter with her math homework

and playing cars with my son

and having a heart to heart with my other daughter before

spending time with my husband one on one in the evenings and then, well, then I have to sit down and

research an online database and write a few pages for that paper due at the end of the term

and submit it for feedback from my professor.

Nevermind that work meeting I need to attend and the accreditation report due Tuesday or the five loads of laundry waiting to be shoved into the machine.  The dirty dishes are getting crusty.

This is my brain on coffee.

This is how I tunnel down the rabbit hole into all the reasons why I have no time.  But everyone has the same twenty four hours and I still have the same twenty four hours I did ten  years ago, or twenty years ago, it’s just utilized differently.  Stopping myself in my tracks when this list of reasons pops up to derail my best intentions has been helpful as I transition each day to my reading and writing.  I’ve also decided that anytime I’m about to complain out loud about anything at all, no matter how big or how trivial, I will pray instead.  I’ve got some work to do.

To which my husband evokes Bill Murray’s Phil Conners statement to Rita: Gosh, you’re an upbeat lady.

You see, I did this several years ago with reading. Being intentional, that is.  I grew up reading everything I could, from the school to the church library, writing my name on the checkout cards during card catalog days.  R.L. Stine, to Max Lucado, to the cereal box.  I know, right?

As I entered motherhood and didn’t prioritize my time, reading and writing fell off my list in a major way.  I gave myself excuses as to why I couldn’t invest in either, which is just a bunch of malarkey and fear, because reading and writing costs zero dollars and is pretty easy for me to come by.  Wake up early, stay up late, shut off the TV, whatever.  There’s no gym membership fee, no drive to get somewhere to actually take part in reading.  It’s actually one of the easiest hobbies, jobs, and careers to have, in that sense.  The pain and difficulty of being a reader and a writer is that you have to get out of your own mind and just do it.  Even when the book or the writing is uninspiring, uninteresting, unexciting.  Even when you are rejected.

So I decided to read voraciously again the year I turned thirty.  I read every classic book that I could spare time for, which turned out to be a whole heck of a lot.  Capote’s In Cold Blood ,Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina.  Steinbeck, Dostoevsky, Sinclair, Camus, Austen.  My husband and I would hit the university library every week with our outdated alumni school ID’s, pulling volumes off of the grey, metallic storage shelves located in a lower level warehouse space.  We would check out several at a time and then go home and just devour them, sitting side by side and sipping coffee on the sofa or on the patio chairs out back on mild evenings.  When I finally worked up the guts to apply for the teaching position that I wanted, they asked for a book list of what I had read over the past year.  To this day, five years after getting that teaching job, my colleagues still bring up that daunting reading list.  And I look back and think, how easy was that?  I mean, yes, I had to finish my master’s degree to land the job.  But if all things being equal, that’s what they remember.  That crazy reading list I had a blast investing in and conversing with my husband over countless hours about what we found between the pages.

Which brings me back to my gift certificate that I have not spent yet, because I cannot decide what book is worthy of such a splurge.

Maybe I should go to the library.

The energy was high today as students across our schools sang Christmas carols in unison. Classrooms were swept of crushed peppermint candy cane and sugar cookie crumbs after wiping down counters from custard and eggnog spills.  Twinkle lights were shut off and packaged gifts gathered into piles as students, parents, and teachers alike waved and wished “Merry Christmas!” to one another.  Freezing rain was falling, but spirits were high as the school semester closed and Christmas holiday officially kicked off.  The celebrations have just begun.

It has been a long month.  During the season of Christmas anticipation and Advent, students become more and more restless in expectation of the coming break from classes.  What I love about my school is that while it would be easy to employ desperate measures to entertain fidgeting students, or to give in to the temptation to “check out” and put aside assignments, our hallways were humming during the weeks before Christmas holiday with the familiar routine: readings and recitations, discussion about big ideas, the scribbling of pencil on paper, the study of flashcards in preparation for exams.

Yet if you were to step in from the fringes on the outside into the classrooms themselves, you would observe Advent and Christmas tidings seeping in subtly and intentionally.  My students came into class three times a week and took their seats to continue transcribing Luke 2 into their composition books, the account of the Messiah’s birth, as Handel’s Messiah and O Holy Night played quietly in the background.  They memorized and dramatically recited Sir Walter Scott’s famous poem, “Breathes There the Man with Soul So Dead” about the “wretch, concentered all in self” that so perfectly describes Ebeneezer Scrooge before his miraculous transformation.  Every morning they would take turns reading Charles Dickens’ rich prose, dripping with irony, personification, and imagery. Or they would ask me to read it to them, softening and slowing my voice as I read about the fog and ruddy candlelight, quickening with fright at the ghostly entrance of the unforgettable Marley.  At eleven and twelve years of age, they are taking in the spirit of restful contemplation while the world around them is bustling in quick-paced fashion.

Over the last few weeks, treats and gifts were selected and packaged with care into postal boxes for our adopted troops spending their Christmas in Afghanistan.  Instruments were tuned and harnessed into submission as these young masters transfixed their listeners with carols and hymns to celebrate Incarnation.  As he sent us off today, our headmaster reminded us the breathtaking reality that Our Lord is celebrated all over the Earth this week. It was a remarkably stirring thought.

I have a natural tendency to feel guilty about celebrating excessively, and that it is better to do all things in moderation, or even conservatively.  Perhaps this is the residue and remembrance of years in which we had to make do with much less, and I still feel the need to celebrate conservatively in order to be “responsible”, because those years are not long-distant.  I’ve felt the deep desire of wanting Advent brings in my gut, of a difficult and pain-filled world at my doorstep and in my own life in very difficult ways. Advent has been lived for the better part of my adult years while I wait for the promise that all things will be made new again. But I was reminded this week (on Twitter of all things) to celebrate-–and then celebrate some more.

I was reminded in the character of Scrooge’s nephew, Fred, who so eloquently shares:

“There are many things from which I might have derived good by which I have not profited, I dare say,” returned the nephew, “Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas-time, when it has come round-apart from… the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that-as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!”- A Christmas Carol, Stave I

Threfore, celebrate all of the things.

Celebrate with warm and colored lights, fragrant trees, roaring fires, and exuberant, hearty feasts.

Celebrate with great laughter,  loud and rousing games, and with dear, close family.

Celebrate with toasts to newness and hope and peace.

Celebrate with colorful packages and abundant gifts covered in bows all spilling out of stockings, and by tucking children deep into their Christmas Eve covers with whispers about the morning that awaits.

Celebrate with traditions and movies and wishes for crisp, pure snow.

Celebrate the coming Messiah in extravagance for the King of Kings, who is Love that came down.

Adeste Fidelis

Glory to the newborn King!

“And God Bless Us, Everyone”- CD

We would throw our line and fish off the dock with squirmy, dirty, translucent worms on the cul de sac off Landing Way Dr., across from Robert Morris Park on H Ave. It was all new.  The slippery scale of freshwater lake fish against my hands as the sun hung golden in flaming wildfire, and the water was warm at twilight. Will would wrap his fingers over mine to secure and pull the hook and show me how to re-bait and I could smell the dryer sheet fragrance on his cotton t-shirt. Then we would tumble into the steel bottomed fishing boat with the ice-cooler and motor out to the center of the lake with Mark and Wendy, fishing for hours until we were sticky and sweaty as the sun sank and the fireflies came out.  Then we would jump into the dark lake, shadowy with floating seaweed when the heat got unbearable, dipping our foreheads back into the inky-cool recess of the coves, blowing bubbles through our noses, and our laughter rising as we dunked one another before hoisting back into the haul with the dying fish. Late spring always drips and twills with newness, awakening, rousing from slumber–a birthing that melts into the heavy growth of summer. Our first season when we were all just barely legal adults.

We had married in a snowstorm while I clutched pale pink roses down the aisle, the palest I could find, with just a faint hint of blush-like watercolor sweep to Pachabel’s Cannon in D against my ethereal white and bead gown that was fashioned around my waist with tiny silk stitches.  That diapason of piano key was furrowing both of our marrow for eternity, waving through the tall church windows where my grandpa officiated, and out into the snowy garden.  Hushed humanity and candlelight, bodies with rings of promise on their own fingers and heart scars.  Skin and muscle and soul surrounded us and held our shoulders and our necks and looked into our eyes and kissed our cheeks and told us we were beautiful.  Then they sang out in unison as we slipped rings over one another’s hands because they knew what we faced.

With this ring, thee I wed.  With my body, I thee worship, and with all my worldly goods I thee endow, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Will bought me an exquisitely delicious, wood in-lay music box with green velvet under the lid for Christmas three months before we took our vows. It played the Pachabel’s Canon in D.  I would twist the key with a click-tick and lay back on my pillows and quilt, swallowing its goodness into my ribs as I twirled the white-gold prayer ring against my lip he had engraved, circled with diamonds, and gifted me on my 19th birthday.  He wanted me to remember that he prayed for me.  The men in my life have always been a ballast.

We spent the spring and summer months after our snowstorm wedding fishing in the evenings ,and then flinging ping-pong balls in his Dad’s basement late into the night, with his brother and my soon to be sister in law.  Bill would charcoal grill the fish he taught me to scale on his back concrete step and saute green beans with butter and pepper, greeting me, “Hey beautiful”, and grasping me in embrace.  He still does this every time we go home.

I cried in bed when Will and I had to move away from our hometown and our Gull Road apartment and the ping pong table and his Dad.  I was the one who wanted to go and Will said yes.  We married and then when it came time I wept, forlorn to leave our Peninsula and Lake but more than the land I hated leaving our deeply built and forged past and present of friendship and family.  I felt like I was betraying it all, even though we were sent off in love. It was our people we were leaving and our past that was thrusting us forward when I wasn’t ready to leave.  We searched the new city for an apartment we could afford that didn’t smell of mold and was close to campus.  We settled on a tiny one-bedroom with the refrigerator shoved against the cabinets, washing machine in our bedroom, and our textbooks piled next to the desktop computer, millenials emerging into adulthood while I pushed creeping homesickness down to my feet.  We ate cheap TV dinners from Walmart.  Date night consisted of two dollar shaved ice from the Bahama shack. We went to the dollar theater near campus almost every night we weren’t working, because it was cheaper than renting a video from the Blockbuster.  The first movie we watched at the theater was Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones; Hayden Christiansen and Natalie Portman in the ambrosial divine of Naboo are still  attached to me like a branding because it was the first. I started drinking coffee that semester, scrounging quarters from my red GAP backpack I still carried from high school, blowing the milked and sugared liquid to lukewarm.  (I’ve graduated to black now.)  I was gulping between Western Civ. and American Literature, studying in half moments out near the fountain behind Demoss and the Hanger of old campus, the bookstore, and pulling all-nighters in our apartment.  The old fountain was tucked near the Shilling Center and the education hall, tree branches rustling, and spring blossoms raining their petals into my hair as I lay against the scraggly grass weed.  After classes in the morning I would change for work at the pharmacy, finding relief in seeing people that began to know me even though I was lost in a sea of faces in class.

Everyone has an opinion of Liberty University, and that’s fine by me, but those years are wrapped in a thirsty tenderness. It was our germination, awakening, and birth among Virginia apple blossoms and mountain red bud.

We came home for Mark and Wendy’s wedding three months after our move.  It was November and everything was blazing red leaves, brilliant blue sky, fragrant, moody nights of Autumn.  I sucked in my sorrow because the holidays were upon us and we would be back.

It was that next, first Virginia spring of 2003 that I fell in irrevocable love with seed-time in Appalachia and the Blue Ridge: heavy, warm rain and so much electric green and damp bark, diving into Main Street Eatery to encounter decadent cheesecake and lose ourselves in the spaghetti mess of Lynchburg roadways before GPS was a thing.  We purchased laminated maps of the city and stashed them in the glove compartment of our Buick, learning the names of the streets and what they wound into, up and over hills and valleys and waterfalls.  Will would drive and I would tell him where to turn, so I learned direction and names faster than he did.  And then when we weren’t in class or working or at the theater or lingering at the bowling alley, we were in the bookstore gulping more coffee and studying textbooks and fat stacks of flashcards.  Flinging the windows up, my favorite was to sleep with them open all night, the sound of rain pelting the grass and shrubbery outside our bedroom window like a lullaby.

Years crept by in slow motion, filled with faces, working through each, confronting this life of ours.  Moving back to our family, moving back to the South, and all the pages that could fill up between those lines.

Then, this summer, sixteen years later, we returned home to the hot, hazy summer in Michigan with our three children.  We camped out with family, dipped in pools, and laid sleeping bags out on rankled grass to watch fireworks with our teenage children, Mark and Wendy, and my Dad.  We do this every summer, but for the first time in a decade homesickness washed over me in a feverish wave.  It was palpable and tangible, resting in my rib cage and burgeoning.  It made me telephone my parents weeks afterward and speak for hours into the night, like when we first moved away and unsure of myself and desperately needing wisdom and missing my youth.

Will and I found ourselves back on campus today, situating ourselves comfortably in the upholstered booths with our fat laptops, feeling a bit out of place in this city of twenty somethings and their razor thin monitors.  I look at him as he works, grey in his beard coming through, and I smile.  We have lived another lifetime since we were here before but we still are partners…moving through the next shift of our lives together.  That Pachabel’s Cannon in D swimming between us.  We traded our Buick of days gone by for our silver Dodge minivan, parking in the same spot behind the dining hall across from the train tracks, but now it is a four story parking garage.  Everything is so familiar, but incredibly different from back then: the dusty parking lot of David’s place, the paint chipping off of the fountain near the Hanger where we used to buy cheap fried chicken and I’d lay in the grass between class, and the dimly lit education hall– all are gone.  It is state of the art these days with Jeffersonian architecture and precision.  A massive student union with rising stone steps extends off of Demoss.  Instead of plunking away on a desktop computer in the small Demoss computer lab, I’m plugged into an outlet and a USB in the ample studying space that spreads throughout a four story tower library.  We peer through glass into the immense depths of the robotic system: several stories and uncountable rows of steel boxes filled with books that a robotic arm can retrieve with a request from my click on a screen.  My fear of heights kick into overdrive when we descend the glass, floating staircase that hovers over the terrace level.  Glass windows ranging four stories give an expansive view to the waterfall and lake behind the Vines center.  I slip into the quiet, still, and silent Reading Room to find my beloved classic literature and pull a few titles from the shelves I’ve started to familiarize myself with.  It is a far cry from the basement, warehouse library I used to frequent during undergrad and even my master’s degree days.  It is a picture of our lives in many ways…these humble beginnings and blessings that are so great we cannot recognize fully, except that we have so much to give and pass on.   It still takes my breath away.

I feel as though we are back in time, but this is better.  We’ve lived, we’ve despaired, we’ve had joy, we’ve had heartache.  We know enough not to take for granted, and we still embody that tenacious motivation to push forward together, given to us by parents who worked hard and a God who gave us mission.  We have settled into the Blue Ridge valley, with our children and our dog on a plot of half acre.  Will and I planted seedling trees that border the property and have grown three times in a year as a result of the Virginian summer rain.  And it is not lost on me that I am a Swedish-Dutch child from the celery flats of Michigan in her bones, and we planted trees that will grow thick roots here in the Southeast.  I look around and take it all in, knowing it does not always stay, so I can be thankful in all things.  This marriage, this love, this family, this work, this writing–all that God has asked of me to observe.

These days my music box sits atop my antique dresser and I twirl the key to hear Pachabel’s Canon in D, shifting my prayer ring around my finger, nestled between my engagement and wedding bands…a remembrance of a forever vow to pray for one another.

“To stick to my work and have every confidence in it, this I am learning from his (Rodin’s) great and goodly example, as I learn patience from him; it is true, my experience tells me over and over that I haven’t much strength to recokon with, for which reason I shall, so long as it is in any way possible, not do two things, not separate livliehood and work, rather try to find both in the one concentrated effort…”- R.M. Rilke

 

Tilt.

Raw.

Prick.

Plague.

Writhe.

Desolate.

I don’t keep things. I clear them.  But I fill up my body, like a pitcher to the brim, with words and faces and whispers and eyes.  Memories of people I’ve touched with my fingertips and in arm-length embraced, and I’ve looked into their soulness and listened to the words roll from their creased lips like water as they burn into my shoulder blades.  Do you know this, that people can burn into you, even your kidneys, your blood?  Pennies and keys and lint from their pockets, the way each person’s nailbeds are unique unto themselves and their teeth form in curves, the sound of their walking stride…they seep.

Contact.

Gentle.

Oscillate.

Carry.

Predilection.

Surge.

My Jesus, he healed by touch, by knowing acutely and seeing.  The woman who grasped his cloak, he turned to her.  

He turned to her.  This catches me in my lungs.

Then I sift. Words are shifting and ground down under my fingernails, and some of them I backspace or right-click cut and delete and begin again pouring, pouring words.

Well no, I pour faces.  And I always have since childhood. I inhale faces and then write words.

Words that harbor colors, and faces, and emotion with their accented tone and vibration, a resonant stroke.  One tiny word, a blip, that holds hundreds of attachments. So I select them, clip them like singular lavender stalks, and hold their delicate buds in the folds of my upturned skirt grasped in my small palms against my knees, inhaling their speech and poetry. Words sing to me.

Jesus went to every town and village and spoke of His Father’s kingdom, healing their sickness. 

I know your face, I have words for it–

I know your hands, your voice, and your eyes.  I have words for those, too–

When I was young, teenage, I sifted through words in my journal scribbled fat in pencil lead.  Intrepidly, in hushed tones and shy eyes, I whispered to those who were near me those delicate years, long ago back then. Were you there? Because you built me.  And now I grow, folding outward toward sun-speak, noisily and distinct in testimony, this floating boat that sails through wind and storm to stand robust, in banner for the kingdom she was ransomed to in birth. My dear soul-sister teacher once told me to write, and write, and write furiously and with distinction, crystallizing and exact, to name the people who’ve touched me in every recessive pore, and to not be afraid.  I’ve never looked backward for a second.

Thank you, Myrna Jean.

I told my students this week that it is mystery, wonderful, beautiful that God speaks in language to us.  This dialect, this vernacular tongue, that sifts my muscle fiber like a  charge. When I say this to them I use my hands in erupted gesture the way my husband has taught to me, and I whisper the word mystery as I smile, and they sit so quietly hanging on to the next narrative I exhale, this breath from God blown out.  Inhale these paragraphs of gospel mixed with crunchy leaves, recorded history with starry beams of light across vaulted sky.

Even more, I see faces of colleagues who teach me….life in speckled inhalation of Gods image and breath breathed out and I gulp their experience and story and am blessed.  Why am I so profoundly sanctified and resurrected by their testimony of our Savior? Because we breach the barrier and connect, even when we want to hide.  Well, that’s why.

Run through that river, child. 

At the gas pump a still, small voice tells me to go, so I grasp hands with a man who introduces himself as Wesley.  They say they are just passing through and have run out of gas, squatting near their van, and I choose to believe them because giving or holding on is more about my character than theirs.  I look into Wesley’s face and there are deep wrinkles, his hair is long, his smile is kind, and I am thankful for the verse that reminds me of entertaining angels.  What if they are?  I have words for him—leathered, coarse and unwashed, eyes like pools and courteous.  He holds my palms and dips his head in genuflection before meeting my face. Another image of my own God that walks this Shadowland of darkness pierced with heaven-light.  His skin feels rough with creases, a story that touches my own fingertips, as I look at him and wish him well.

Jesus touched the blind man’s eyelids with his own hands. 

These faces like journal pages that I flip through, connected to truth substantial and unfeigned, and if I’ve known you ever or only even recently, you are there, too.  I keep them, these loose-leaf, rolling through my mind’s eye, praying for faces that explode into dreams late at night and when music or scent pull me back to memories, or phrases and stories bring me to recollect.  Do  you know an old dear friend sent me a video of speech memories and you parents, you grandparents, you cousins and family, you friends of my dear youth and also of my age, you teachers of mine, you colleagues…well.  We are the collect of those who have come before us and against us and weave their lives into us side by side.

To pray- beseech, appeal on behalf of, invoke, petition, supplicate…..cry for.   Yes, I cry for you, dear friends.

God spoke and created in His image and then came down in flesh and touched his disciples’ bare feet and then He whisper-asked me to follow Him, my Lord who prayed to the Father, hallowed be His name. 

And so I, the prodigal, am forgiven and redeemed without reason or of my own accord, to be set down low and implore in my humility, lying prostrate to the concrete.  A friend tells me, “I believe God raises up and lays low” and how I resonate, my life surrounded by push and pull, lesson and mercy, depth of despair and rise of joy.  My tears come quickly these days, those eruptions that tell me I feel.  When I was young my face would redden to scarlet when another felt embarrassment or humiliation, embodying, mirroring their emotion before I even knew what it was.  When another tells me of their grief, tears slip over my freckled face without pause.  Your face is collected and I pray, your emotion is felt, dear.

They came, imploring, touching his cloak, and he healed them with with words and a touch, compassion. 

I am merely an impoverished woman with everything starting in my skin, with everything woven through my muscle that tenses and spasms, with all these thoughts of faces and my Christ sitting in my throat.  And the Devil screams at me that I am reckless and I come on too strong, that I destroy, but then my God comes with his words living in me, silently, Kingly, enveloping these lonely places and livening them to full and complete.

He healed and then sent them on a mission to touch others and give words to those who needed hope.

“And it feels like the church isn’t anything more
Than the second coming of the Pharisees
Scrubbing each other ’til their tombs are white
They chisel epitaphs of piety

Oh, there’s a burning down inside of me
‘Cause the battle seems so lost
And it’s raging on so silently
We forget it’s being fought

So, Amen
Come, Lord Jesus
Amen
Oh, Amen
Come, Lord Jesus
Amen”

-Andrew Petersen

 

 

 

 

I am 35 years old and so is my husband, with three children and a dog, living in our four bedrooms and two point five baths in a wooded, hilly neighborhood in the Piedmont valley when my brother comes to visit.  He has driven down from DC, arriving late in the night, and now he locks himself in the hall bath to shave clean and clip his hair close.  I knock on the door, “Are you done yet?”, because some things never change.  Even when we were teenagers his hygiene ritual was impeccable and precise.  Always order. Always.

His voice has sounded like our dad’s on the phone for the last ten years.  He steps out with his skin smelling of aftershave and his lower scalp smooth.   I just want to hold him in close embrace, and I do. In the morning his Charlie uniform will be pressed and pristine, all hardware and notions in place without error, the tie clipped to his breast, the collar starched, carrying his clean cover in his hand as he waves and closes the door.

The night prior we were landing lines back and forth from the random movies we grew up with: Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis in The Great Race and Jerry Lewis. The theatrical production of Peter Pan with Mary Martin.  It is our mother’s fault we are so oddly familiar with 60’s film.  Hello Dolly, My Fair Lady. It is something she still loves to witness–the quick banter that streams back and forth as if we are back in time twenty, no, thiry years.

When he was in boot camp, 2002, he stood east at attention toward the Atlantic coast and sang happy birthday to me, his older sister he admired, and then wrote me a letter telling me he did so.  Two years later that same weekend would hold very different memories for him.

I learned when we were teenagers that I could no longer pin him, straddled, and hold him down–tickling his ribs with one hand and holding his hands with my knees until he screamed, and then spitting in his open mouth.  Older sisters are cruel until they stand in the shadow of younger brothers who grow taller, that’s for sure.  But as we solidified our friendship in high school he still loved Star Wars, Die Hard, Rocky, and all the others; always jumping and skate boarding and wrestling and joking and running.  For my 16th birthday he gifted me the Rocky soundtrack.

Now, 15 years after signing the contract, he is in formation at Quantico with his wife looking on in pride, his children reaching out their tiny, eager fingers to him to be picked up, and he is honored for all of his youthful adulthood that has been dedicated.  He holds his wife close and tenderly kisses his son with the same care he cleans and loads his weapon.  And his voice is singular and sure, just as it should be after all these years, directing troops under his guidance.  He has lost comrades in combat, he has lost his mentor after returning State-side.  My dad cries proud to see his son.  My eyes choke.  I always see my brother as sixteen and silly in high school, and yet here he is a man, and I am more proud of the boy that I grew up with than I can ever even say.

On November 8th of each year he goes off grid and meets the others, the Semper Fi palpable as they toast those brothers they lost in the desert a decade before who cannot be forgotten.

They cannot be forgotten.

Firework explosions and sounds in the night are different after sleeping near the enemy, and dodging bullets meant for your flesh, and living when your friend is sent home draped in a body bag–these are only able to be recovered in time.  And maybe even time doesn’t erase entirely. To honor them he folds flags and presents them to weeping families year after year, saluting at attention, every shot damning him to remember service and protection.  But he keeps his mouth shut in public about politics and bureaucracy, struggling with a nation’s ignorance, even though he fought for their right to own it.

I am so proud of my brother my body aches.  He is a hero.

I feel safe when he is in our home visiting.  In the dark of night, with the doors locked and madness on the television, a Marine sleeps at attention.

This is the man who, as a young teen, used to ask me if his shirt matched his pants every morning before school, as he stepped out of the half bath plastered in brushstroke 90’s wallpaper.  Erin, is my  hair okay?  I’m not sure why he asked me…I rolled out of bed with the confidence of kings, running a toothbrush over my teeth with sleep in my eyes, and slipping on rumpled, baggy, Ambercrombie and Fitch charcoal khakis, my long blonde hair in tousled, sleepy waves like Kat from 10 Things I Hate About You.

No, literally.  I was Kat from 10 Things I Hate About You.  Thankfully, we’ve both grown up.

Then I would yell at him to get in the car for school…his morning ritual was precise…legendary, if you will.  I’m not sure where I gained this over-confidence and complete lack of the typical older child, Type- A personality.  We were the sweet Baptist kids who wore matching clothes for church directory photographs before eating at hot, sweltering summer potlucks in blazers and pantyhose.  He looked up to me while acting as a protective older brother…the best and most loyal friend of my childhood.

The thing about friendship is that when it is pure and simple, you see each and every flaw, you fight terribly, and love fiercely.  He would ride in my grey hatchback, or I would jaunt with him in the old Taurus with the automatic seatbelts, and we would belt out Five Iron Frenzy or Yellowcard, dreaming of Cali…the place I’ve still never lived to see, but he has been numerous times to report for duty.  Every time I would take in the recognition of a boy in high school, his insides would go rigid. When I married, he was sick, just sick, with nostalgia….Why do things have to change?  Why must we leave at all?

Because we have people to grow into and become and do good in this world.

For a window of time I felt like I had a life I was destined to live, simultaneously leaving him behind to figure out life on his own, as if it was a betrayal. We both moved to opposite sides of the country within two weeks of each other…I to Virginia with my new husband, he to California for boot camp.  We were still kids at 19 and 20 years old.

Today, when we get together, David and I repeat movie lines. Rocky, Paulie, Ernest, Joe Fusco.  Push the button Max. As if we’ve lost no time at all.

These Marines, these vets, are such normal, real people.  But they are also the fiercest, and most loyal, ready to protect and stand in defense in an instant.  My brother never talked about being a Marine while we were growing up.  I cannot remember one time at all that he alluded to it.  Unless you take 007 on Nintendo 64, Sonic the hedgehog, and skateboarding as indication.

A year after 9-11 he signed his name at the recruitment office.  I had sat plastered to the television late on an early, September evening into the dawn after witnessing the plane crash live, eating breakfast.  I remember the people jumping…jumping from the twin towers to death as flames hurled above them and seeing the TIMES cover plastered with their last moments.  The collapse of the towers is burned into my memory because I witnessed it in real time.

And my brother said, I will go.

The Marines, they call themselves brothers.  But my brother, he is mine, over and above all. We grew together through disparate years of burgeoning lives…and I am proud, so proud of this man.

He is my brother.

When I was 15 I went to Colorado.

We drove for over two full days in two (or more?  my memory is sketchy) 15 passenger vans across the Midwest.  It was unbearably hot and sweltering.  There were a handful of twenty-something chaperones and a myriad of high-schoolers gunning for the wilderness.  It was glorious.  Open Road is actually a fictional recount drawn from our insane drive across the United States and the emotions that matched it.  In fact, there is more from where that came from.  Wink.

It was June, summer. We recouped at base camp before spending three days hiking the Rockies with only what we carried on our packs.  We rock propelled off the mountain surface, white water rafted the treacherous rapids, and dealt with the elements for several days. Then we sat at base camp in tepees, rolling our t shirts and shorts in tight compression before setting out into the utter unknown. I remember after miles of hiking my legs were aching, thousands of calories burned,  and sitting at the campfire with orange Tanga in our hot mugs, which was just everything.  Everything.  We thought it was just comfort food, but our guides knew it was sustenance   We also ate ration soup.

Our two wilderness guides taught us how to keep warm at night.  The trick counters what would think, but you wear just your underwear and then stuff your cocoon sleeping bag with your remaining clothes around you. You don’t wear them, but stuff them to the outer edges of the bag.  Somehow they conduct heat.  Every morning I would wake with the cocoon bag wrapped around my body, cinched over my face with the frost outside, toasty warm within my triangle tent barrier from the elements on the edge of the Colorado Rockies.  One morning there was snow and we woke in amazement that the packing clothes in our bags actually worked!  We were warm and it was pleasant in our bags.  The mental struggle was to come to the fire in camp set by our  two guides.  We drank hot Tanga again for breakfast and applied corn adhesive to our ankles before packing camp.  I remember one our of our guides’ names was Mara: bitterness.

There was one day that was incredibly damp.  I was heavy with moisture in my wool boot socks and thin, cotton shorts as I trudged the muddy, rock-strewn trail.  My 80 pound pack dug into my shoulders.   I pictured Sylvester Stallone as I set my face to the task, a favorite inspiration for my brother and I.

But despite these internal, mental struggles, the path was breathtaking.  When I felt trod down I would tell myself, at fifteen, to look up.  To look at each water droplet that slid and sunk from the electric green leaf to the beauteous, grey-brown rocks below.  It was like an orchestra, the falling rain to the mountain we ascended.  Soul-catching.

I was envisioning Rocky (my favorite movie character)  and my boyfriend at the time who told me I could do it, and to persevere. I had been tasked with carrying the stove and propane which made me carry quite a heavy load for a 100 pound girl.  I was carrying almost twice my weight up a state park mountain.  I put my head down and got to work.  This was my playground.

We pitched our tents near a mountain stream, filling our water bottles.  We dropped iodine tablets into them.  A trip to the bathroom included a shovel and pine cones.  I was in the beginning of my month and could leave nothing behind.  Our tents were mere tarps over the muddy mountainside, a triangle canvas hovering on a slope.  It down poured for over 12 hours.  I remember sitting in the tent for hours with Deborah.  I had flashcards in my pack, the writer that I am I always had something to write on, even at 15.  I wrote down songs that we streamed out, laying on our backs on the hard ground, laughing our way through the evening of damp, wet, cold, mountain tenting.

In the morning we ascended the peak and the wind whipped harder than anything that I have ever felt.  It was like life ripping through me. The feeling…it was like I was standing on a photograph: the cuts, rivets, and valleys of the Rocky mountains alive with snow and evergreen, and I was on top of it all.  My size 7 booted feet upon the Rockies that Lewis and Clark marked and mapped two hundred years before.  My breath was caught within me.

And in the end, we gathered around the broad river, the night fire blazing among us as we gathered.  It is in these glorious moments we are pulled back to the glory of the Creator, as well as the searing of souls together.  For that, dear Lord, I am thankful.  That creation breaches nature and draws in my neighbor.  I praise Thee.