A Life of Distraction

We had three of the grandchildren here for the weekend -- seven-year old Annabelle and three-year-old twins Addison and Bennett. Annabelle is the quintessential, curious firstborn, where all the rules are black and white, and everything's a party. Her Mama says that A often bemoans the fact that they are eating "alone" -- just because it's only the five of them. She never stops talking and is eager for the next social encounter, whatever kind that might be. Addison is an adorable ginger-haired sassy gal, hamming it up at every turn. She might just be smarter than us. Bennett regales in his boy-ness, enjoying nothing better than aggravating his sisters with his latest weapon from his arsenal. But then he is the snuggliest of sugar bears. We had a ball with them.

When it came to Sunday night and they went home to their parents, Ken turned to me and said, "How did we ever do all that?!" It might have had something to do with being 25 years younger and the fact that they don't come in litters. You start out with one at a time (usually) and work up from there. It's been a long time since we've had three at once. But I was definitely stunned by the amount of food, drink and diapers that it takes to keep the world turning. And with twins, they do all those things, all at the same time. Including getting into trouble. 

My takeaway from the weekend, besides the fact that having grandchildren is the most wonderful thing ever, is that I simply have to get my house under control. Everywhere you look, there's boxes of junk, piles of things I have no idea what to do with, projects half-finished and reams of random papers growing on every horizontal surface. The problem with a creative brain is that it likes to hop around. Ken says I'm a tent dweller and it's true. More than a day or two on an activity and I'm ready for the next wind to come along. I'm a great starter and he's a great finisher. But he doesn't want to mess with my particular projects, so he becomes the cattle prod to my wayward ways. It's a miracle we haven't killed each other. 

So where to begin? Everywhere I look are meaningful piles and undiscovered adventures, all waiting to be plumbed. My brain is a bit fuzzy and in the middle of it all, I still have to work at my day job. Who's got time to divert that much?! I've spent enough money on organization books to choke a horse, and nobody wants to call the maid (she's an amazing figment of my imagination). I've had numerous offers from folks to help me, but I might be too proud to take them up on it. 

We're going camping in a couple of weeks, but I need to paint all the doors I've taken off and find some baskets to put all our supplies in. Then somebody needs to call the cavalry in and have them reupholster all those dining room chairs I took apart last week. There's nowhere to eat around here except the recliners. And you know what happens when you plop down in one of those. The glowing light calls your name as you eat your supper. The joints settle in and then you'll find Pa and I sawing logs through yet another episode of Silent Witness. Marie Kondo, I'm going to burn your books...

Which Path Do I Take?

Someone posited a question in that great bastion of wisdom, Facebook: "What is more important: truth or kindness?" There were dozens of responses, and they all said that kindness was more important than truth. What have we come to? I suppose it's better to lie than to be unkind? It's better to be sweet than to uphold justice? I'm afeared for this generation. 

Maybe these are just some really nice people who don't want to hurt anyone's feelings. Maybe our current culture has made folks step back and reevaluate their tone. I'm afraid that we've lost the foundations that make a society able to stand, when things become difficult. Because if truth matters less than kindness, there's no path to follow...it all becomes relative to any given situation. 

I looked up the words "truth" and "mercy" in the scriptures. They are used together over and over, inseparable from one another. In Psalm 85, it even says "Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other." So it's not that we should choose one or the other. It's that both are necessary. Truth without kindness or love is a hollow master. Kindness without truth is a gradual slouch towards meaninglessness. "Speak the truth in love" is another scripture whose application requires thought and wisdom. 

The truth can hurt, and not everything has to be said, just because it's true. The signposts of truth are what lead one to repentance. Then it's mercy that gives hope and light for life. We need them both, especially now.

Wake Up and Smell the Joy

After a fitful half-night of sleep, I stumbled onto the cool wood floor, blurry and unsure of what planet I had landed on. I'm still recovering from major abdominal surgery, with drain lines snaking out of my body and a big compression garment contorting my insides. There's no real sleep happening, every which way I turn hurts, but time and work march on and I'm trying to not be a wimp. My dear husband has been an angel, listening to my whining and tucking me gently in every night. 

As I wobbled out the door to let the dog do her business, my bare feet hit the mushy, cold, wet grass. Mud squished up between my toes as I regretted not putting on my neon pink Crocs. She took her time, sniffing and wandering all over the yard for just the right spot. This dog is insecure and wants me right next to her before she eats, sleeps or eliminates. She kept looking to me, to follow her through the miserable grass until her Highness discovered the best pile of leaves to go in. My grumpy self barked at her, "Hurry up! I wanna go back to bed!" I was half-dressed, cold, and pondering my silly first-world problems when I looked up to the sky. Periwinkle blue melted over to the east, where coral pink and yellow spilled all over the tops of the trees. The light and air fairly glowed with golden dew. The birds were having a music festival, three chipmunks tittered and ran in front of me, and the dog started rolling gleefully in the moss (we don't have grass, it's apparently not possible). I decided to go ahead and take a little walk. The whole earth was welcoming the day with something akin to a symphony and I needed to get in on it.

Just a brief stroll around the corner, and my heart lifted with the simple beauty of God's creation. The leaves are just about to turn, the animals are storing up, the sky is clear as a bell and I can smell folks making breakfast. There's mud and mess and mayhem in the news. But the front page right here is a lung-ful of sweet air, my good neighbors all around living life, all my children tucked in with their spouses and babies, husband already at work, and a new day dawning. Happy day.

Happy Campers

 I'll never forget that early fall morning, the first cool Saturday Ken and I had had since we married the spring before. I was driving down a street in Mableton, where we lived, when I saw a nice pop-up camper for sale in a neighbor's yard. I grew up tent camping on Lake Allatoona with my family. When we graduated to a decrepit pop-up camper that my folks bought and renovated back to mint condition, we thought we'd won the lottery.   Back then, we didn't have cellphones, so I used the owner's house phone to call him. "Hey honey, I just found a pop-up camper here around the corner for sale. It's in great condition and they're only asking $125! Can I buy it?!" A long pause, then he said, "Does it have a bathroom?" I retorted: "Of course not, it's a POP-UP camper. They don't have bathrooms. But it's way better than a tent and it's awesome." He said, "Naw, I'm not camping in anything that doesn't have a bathroom. I'm really a Holiday-Inn-kind-of guy." Somewhere along the line, even though I'd played football, basketball, tennis and every kind of competitive board game with my husband, I had failed to ask about his views on the subject of camping. But heck, he wore lots of flannel and looked for all the world like a lumberjack. Surely this was not a problem. In my list of must-haves, I wanted a guy who loved Jesus, wanted a house full of kids, could chop some wood, but especially that I didn't sense in any way that I might could beat up. I was a college athlete and grew up playing ball with my Daddy and sister in the front yard. Any serious dating relationship of mine at some point included at least an arm-wrestling match. When I teased at wrestling Ken one day and he pinned me faster than a duck on a June bug, that box was happily checked. This new knowledge took me aback, but I didn't believe in divorce. Somehow we were going to have to make it work.

So we did, without camping. Until I managed to persuade the man to move us and four kids into an old camper onto our land, where we lived for two years and built a house. We sold the thing after we moved in the house and figured that would be the end of that. Until this summer...one of our sons and his wife bought a camper and renovated it. He started talking about us getting one. In recent years, I have enjoyed surprising Ken with various "toys" (used, of course) on birthdays and holidays. I've gotten him a truck and a golf cart, to his great surprise. So one night, our son teased Ken about a camper on Facebook marketplace and made him think that I'd gone and bought it. I went along with the joke, and when the kids left, Ken turned to me and said, "I can't believe you bought that!" I told him it was all a joke and that we were pulling his leg. His crestfallen face surprised me. He was disappointed! So of course I started looking for a used camper in earnest, eventually buying one and pulling it up to Los Cowboys one evening and surprising him at dinner. We've been on a quest these last few weeks, to figure out how it works, where we're gonna camp soon, and buying supplies for the thing. I'm going to paint it all vintage colors and doll it up. I've got all the supplies, but now recuperating from surgery so I have to wait a few weeks to get painting. Meanwhile, I'm fit to be tied. Papa finally wants to go camping! But then again, it does have a bathroom...

Live or Die

Planes and Surgery....those two events always prompt me to assess my life in grave and serious ways. 

I really hate heights, much less hurtling through space in a little metal tube. Everybody around me looks cool and collected, bored even. They don't want me chatting them up, I've found. My kids have informed me that it is simply not done these days. I beg to differ. My whole life has been interesting because of all the wonderful, intriguing strangers I've met, who've been happy to tell me their life stories and birth experiences. Even if they are reluctant to talk at first, they usually end up spilling the beans on their innermost secrets. Occasionally, however, you just can't crack open those tough ones and I'm relegated to silence and my own thoughts of how I'm soon going to die in a fiery plane crash. And then there's trying to squeeze my abundant frame into the smallest possible space, trying not to lop over onto the other passengers. By the time I arrive at my destination, I have heartburn and muscle spasms. This is not fun.

And then there's the subject of surgery. I had a major one this last week, with a very large incision from hip to hip. I spent the days and weeks before it, pondering life and death and the end of civilization as we know it. I have found the best way to go under the knife is to be ready to die. Go ahead and go there. Make peace with all, spend time in the scriptures, pray a lot, confess my sins, have a clear view of my place with God, and then surrender to that anesthesia. I'm always surprised when I wake up. Then comes the pain and I wonder what in the heck I did this for. I was planning on death, not misery and suffering and learning how to go to the bathroom again. I have no right to complain -- my dear husband is the best nurse in the world and he took off a week to care for me. He's a much better physical caregiver than I. He thinks about things like a cool washcloth on the forehead, a fresh cup of icewater, putting meds on an actual schedule (rather than my random plan of waiting until I'm screaming in pain to take something). It's been a sweet week of spending time with him, though closings and real estate wait for no one, so he's helped me with that too.

Planes and surgeries, things looming at the edge of the universe. In truth, every day is a gazing at the precipice of eternity, 'cause we never know when our time's up. Our choices: we can live in cowering, perpetual fear of the unknown or we can just go ahead and really live and suck the marrow out of the day. Here's to life!

Sally Forth...

 With the sweet, cool air that wafted in right behind Hurricane Sally this week, I felt my heart go calm at the same time. It wasn't the weather, though I'll take it. I had a day from the underworld, where I was driving like mad all over Atlanta, multi-tasking, calling, voice-texting and more, to catch up with my post-vacation workload and lots of personal things that needed dealing with. Before and aft, I was throwing up prayers, asking God to help me, for Him to do the things that it would take for it all to work. I felt a little like I was in the Red Sea, with the waves parting just in time to give me safe passage, and then them crashing behind me while I sped down a nice, dry path in the middle. Either side of me threatened to murder me, the best thing to do being to keep my eyes on the Lord. The entire day was like the running of a gauntlet, and God kept right on ushering me through. One of those times when you can hear Him whisper, see Him move the chess pieces. He doesn't always do it that way, but I started out like a squalling baby so I guess He decided I needed a break.

Sometime during the maelstrom of my personal hurricane, I felt the calm at the eye of it. I had an epiphany...it's been two years since my darling Daddy died suddenly, and for the first time, I was able to accept that he is where he is supposed to be. Literally in the middle of this hellish day, I at once knew that he was okay, and that it was okay for me to accept that. Death brings many things, but often guilt or regret. Or it raises up the places where we haven't dealt with our relationships. Thankfully, I have few regrets or guilt when it comes to my Pa, but the wake of his passing sucked my heart to the depths, trying to figure out this hole in the universe that shouldn't be there. There I was, stuck on 285 with a thousand cars whizzing by, crying, singing and raising my hands in surrender (one at a time, ya'll). I think I will forever remember that moment, its sweetness and peace.

Funny how storms come in and wreck everything, then we have to tear down what's left and then rebuild. Better make sure that foundation's not made of sand...

Recovering From Vacation

 We rolled back into Georgia, salty, sandy and exhausted. Pa drove like a bat outa you-know-where, just trying to make it home before sleep overtook him. We had been napping all week at the beach and mid-afternoon called like a siren. Somehow, we made it back in one piece. My daughter and new son-in-love squeezed out from the mountain of luggage and headed back to their house. I'm always amazed at all the trees and greenery that greet us after our annual beach trip. Visitors to our fine state always comment on our leafy habitat. I don't think about it much until I come back from other places, then am in awe at the lush bounty awaiting. 

The old house is musty as we come in. It forgets that people live here, when we go away. It takes it a couple of days to let go of the ancient dust. I light candles and diffuse essential oils, bringing it back to life. I guess I'll open the place up, even though Hurricane Sally is bringing the Gulf right on up here to rain on us. I also always forget how beautiful my house is, then walk from room to room looking at the amazing wood on the floors and the wavy stained glass beaming at me. I'm always glad that somehow it didn't burn down while we were gone. Nothing is forever, but I'd like it to last another century.

Monday comes and I hit the floor running. There's a lot on my plate, too much to bear sometimes, and there's nothing like a nice, long vacation to make you forget all that. There should be a law that we get a second week to do nothing, after we get back home. Either way, the work doesn't sleep and I'm hoofing it to get back some sort of equilibrium. Pa and I bought a camper that I'm going to overhaul. It's sitting out in the driveway, waiting for me to kiss it with vintage-colored paints and fabrics. I've bought supplies and they're piled up in the carport, but there's property to be sold and folks to be helped. I'll think about it tomorrow. But you know I'd rather be painting.