Life Lately... April 2024

Lately, our living room floor has been the primary surface to sit and intricately fold pieces of paper into swans, lions, and fighter jets. I find paper airplanes nose down in the red oxalis or lost in cavernous spaces between the wall and couch. My six-year-old son spent much of Easter on his own while the rest of us had a nasty stomach bug. (Lately, we have endured so much sickness!) The next day, I found no less than 100 paper airplanes parked in the living room, folded into any model he could find directions for in our origami book. He had spent the entire day folding. 


Lately, I keep a book of poetry or prose next to the area where I brew my morning tea. In these six minutes, I promise myself that I will not unload the dishes or try to straighten the dining room table but instead savor the words of someone else’s perspective. I have been able to read through the poetry of Mary Oliver, Bianca Stone, and Annie Dillard's short book “The Writing Life” in these tiny, sacred moments.


Spring has been cool and stunning. Lately, I design all my running routes around the areas I know are brimming with magnolia trees, bluebells, redbuds, daffodils, or tulips. Because my endorphins are pumping, I am moved by the fact that each of these plant entities waits all year to perform such specific magical blooms for a brief period. All year they wait and then dazzle for a particular moment. These flowers will never be seen again. If I blink, I miss it and will have to wait a whole year to see the next generation! And because my endorphins are still pumping and I am listening to Tim Keller, I start to relate this phenomenon to our brief time here on earth and see our little lives on par with the bloom time of the crabapple tree in her magnificent magenta. In my notes app: God’s design for our little, beloved lives. Maximize bloom potential.


Lately, we spend the cooler, rainy weekends with friends playing the game Wavelength. I love a game that brings laughter-tears, a little confusion, and a lot of group problem-solving. This game brought much joy on those evenings that were still so dark. This particular weekend I get to enjoy the “mind-reading” game with a friend’s new puppy on my lap. Lately, I am in love with a three-pound ball of curls named Bev. 

Something from almost nothing

She had a story about her seven-year-old daughter that I love to think about in spring. It was a tiny snippet of a story- a side conversation really. Her daughter would pick up fallen scraps of foliage on the concrete slab floor of a Lowes Home Garden Center and tuck them in her pockets. You know... the loose vines and leaf stems that are usually swept up at the end of the day and tossed. The flowers and their damaged stems, rolled over by carts and careless sandal feet. Garbage to most people. No one noticed her collecting the rejected scraps. Most people were looking at the full-bodied plants. Days later her mother found sedums and begonias propagating in her bedroom windows. Her daughter propagated a whole garden from damaged discard. Each spring I wonder where she is now and what incredible things she is creating from almost nothing. 

Offscreen Voices & Backyard Beauties

An advantage of our quirky, partially subterranean dining room is the intimate view of our garden and a

fantastic view of the sky. We can often observe animals and birds much closer than if we were outside among them- sometimes mere inches from their little bodies. I plant wildflowers, poppies, and dwarf hydrangeas in this space adjacent to our wide windows to draw these furry and feathered friends closer. From the dining room table I can watch chipmunks scurry between the blooming coneflowers, praying mantises creep across thick bearded iris stems, goldfinches perch on wintered heads of sedum, and the red cardinal settle on the bare branches of the lilac tree. During breakfast in summer we see a monarch land on the hummingbird feeder and wonder aloud if that is the same monarch we kept safe in our home while she crystallized and transformed. Is she still lingering a few days more in our garden? 

I keep a space for videos of “things I see in my backyard” on my Instagram. They catalog little ghost prints of beauty witnessed right outside our dining room window. I revisit the fires that Ben made in the snow, Olivia and I drinking White Russians in the glow of the flames and giggling at the effort my then three-year-old son exerts to pull his seven-year-old sister on a sled. I can recapture the image of the time it snowed 24+ inches and I shoveled it all into a mountain so we could have our own sled hill. That same evening I recorded Ben, solo, climbing and sledding down that hill in the light of the Christmas lights we strung across everything living in the backyard. What truly pokes at my heart is not the recording of the possum passing under the hosta but the offscreen voices: the one-year-old babbling to himself “bub bub bub”, a tiny two-year-old voice commenting to a butterfly that “he’s so so so cute”, or the one-year-old narrating “big….. bug…. I seeeeee” as an enormous praying mantis on our window sill bends and extends one of her middle legs like a ballerina warming up at the barre.

I often think social media (specifically Instagram) is a literal manifestation of my favorite Jean-Paul Sartre quote: “I live in the past. I take everything that has happened to me and arrange it. From a distance like that, it doesn't do any harm, you'd almost let yourself be caught in it. Our whole story is fairly beautiful. I give it a few prods and it makes a whole string of perfect moments. Then I close my eyes and try to imagine that I'm still living inside it.” Sometimes I am very guilty of still living inside beautiful moments gone by.

But this morning it is a “real feel of -30” and Chicagoland schools have been canceled. It's hard to not be present in dramatic weather. I invite my friend’s children over for the morning and I listen to their voices playing as I type this now. What is more exciting to a child than a snow day/ frigid temp day? Even the homeschooled are excited as they suddenly have hours of their friends in the sunlight again. They are eating lunch in my quirky, sunken dining room and, for as long as I can remember, they have always asked me to read stories to them as they eat. (I imagine I will be devastated the day that they don’t.) So I read a collection of Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories when all of a sudden they are aflutter and pointing outside at the lattice where the chandelier blows in the wind. 

“A woodpecker!” they exclaim excitedly. And there he is, quite close so we can get a very good look, with his striking red cap and white dotted wings, dribbling his bill into the wood beams that are normally nibbled by carpenter bees. We record, of course. I make sure to include the offscreen voices, munching of chips and happy sounds. I know these details will be just as important or more when I watch it one day in the future and remember that day school was called off and we watched a woodpecker dance back and forth between the lattice and beams.

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* An excerpt from a poem that I read today and captured all the things that are all the things I am feeling these past few months: 

Snow Geese by Mary Oliver

"Oh, to love what is lovely, and will not last!

What a task

to ask

of anything, or anyone,

yet it is not by the century or the year but by the hours."

read entire poem here 

Tiny Flower Farm Dream

 

Many summers ago I enjoyed visiting the homes of people who lived along the northern Atlantic seaside. Their homes included a converted barn on a stretch of green meadow thriving on salty air, a house with simple wooden beams whose hillside location allowed for a grand, uninterrupted view of the Atlantic Ocean, and an artist’s studio docked at the edge of a harbor next to a fishing boat. We spent one day with a woman who collected data on the migration of birds, taking a ferry together to an island where we counted endangered birds. I don’t remember much about her home but I do remember the warmth of her small wooden dining room table and a colorful cloth she laid across it for dinner. She sent us out into her meadow with scissors and told us to cut and arrange the flowers for the evening. Her seaside wildflowers in early August were stunning and we collected a variety in the mason jar she provided. 

I wish I could remember so much more but it was the feeling of the evening, among the warmth of her small home with the bursting jar of flowers that I cherish so deeply in my bones. So when we bought a home of our own, I planted flowers for cutting. And when we had children old enough to use scissors, I sent them out into the garden with a jar. This Monday morning we are trying to establish our homeschool rhythm and I’ve been trying to stay prompt, starting at 9:00. But the cicadas are making their fabulous noises and the sun is out but it is cool and most September-ish. So I send them out to the garden with scissors instead of pulling out the workbooks. My daughter comes in with her jar and an unexpected arrangement of flowers. I thought she’d pick from the abundant dahlias and zinnias but instead has chosen some of the white-flowering weeds, sedum, peach-colored berries (are those even from my yard?), and dusty miller. “It represents all the seasons!” Isn’t that just the best way to appreciate beauty? To see what another beholds, be surprised and curious, and then center it on the dining room table for the rest of the day to wonder at another's perception of the world.  

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* Picture: Flowers from my yard

**Fun resource dive: Blossom and Branch Micro Farming Videos