When it snows, he stands at the back door or wanders around the house to each window in turn and watches the weather like a lover. O farm boy, I waited years for you to look at me that way. Now we’re old enough to stop waiting for random looks or touches or words, so I find myself watching you watching the weather, and we wait together to discover whatever the sky might bring. ~Patricia Traxler “Weather Man”
My farm boy does still look at me that way, wondering if today will bring frost, damaging hail, a wind storm, a blizzard,
maybe fog or mist, or soft lazy snowflakes, a scorcher, or a deluge.
I reassure him as best I can, because he knows me so well in our many years together:
today, like most other days will be partly cloudy with a snow shower or two and occasional sun breaks.
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I got out of bed on two strong legs. It might have been otherwise. I ate cereal, sweet milk, ripe, flawless peach. It might have been otherwise. I took the dog uphill to the birch wood. All morning I did the work I love. At noon I lay down with my mate. It might have been otherwise. We ate dinner together at a table with silver candlesticks. It might have been otherwise. I slept in a bed in a room with paintings on the walls, and planned another day just like this day. But one day, I know, it will be otherwise. ~Jane Kenyon “Otherwise”
…this has been a day of grace in the dead of winter, the hard knuckle of the year, a day that unwrapped itself like an unexpected gift, and the stars turn on, order themselves into the winter night. ~Barbara Crooker from “Ordinary Life” in Barbara Crooker: Selected Poems
…it’s easy to forget that the ordinary is just the extraordinary that’s happened over and over again. Sometimes the beauty of your life is apparent. Sometimes you have to go looking for it. And just because you have to look for it doesn’t mean it’s not there. God, grant me the grace of a normal day. ~Billy Coffey
…there is no such thing as a charmed life, not for any of us, no matter where we live or how mindfully we attend to the tasks at hand. But there are charmed moments, all the time, in every life and in every day, if we are only awake enough to experience them when they come and wise enough to appreciate them. ~Katrina Kenison from The Gift of an Ordinary Day
These dead of winter days are lengthening, slowly and surely. I’m thankful I’m retired now so I no longer I leave the farm in darkness to head to work in town, and return in darkness at the end of the workday. I’m able to do my barn chores at either end of the day as the sun is rising to chase away the moon, and later as the sun is chased away by starlight.
I tend to get complacent in my daily routines, confident in the knowledge that tomorrow will be very much like yesterday. The distinct blessings of an ordinary day are lost in the rush of moving forward to whatever comes next. Poet Jane Kenyon wrote her poem with the knowledge she was dying of leukemia, which meant each ordinary day was precious indeed.
The reality is there is nothing ordinary about the events of each day. It might have been otherwise and some day it will be otherwise. That is the hard knuckle of the days we are given, each a gift, each peaches and cream.
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By the road to the contagious hospital under the surge of the blue mottled clouds driven from the northeast — a cold wind. Beyond, the waste of broad, muddy fields brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen
patches of standing water the scattering of tall trees
All along the road the reddish purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy stuff of bushes and small trees with dead, brown leaves under them leafless vines —
Lifeless in appearance, sluggish dazed spring approaches —
They enter the new world naked, cold, uncertain of all save that they enter. All about them the cold, familiar wind —
Now the grass, tomorrow the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf
One by one objects are defined — It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf
But now the stark dignity of entrance — Still, the profound change has come upon them: rooted they grip down and begin to awaken ~William Carlos Williams “Spring and All”
A week still left of January with much of the country in deep freeze, covered in snow and ice with bitter wind chill.
Yet the wintry outsides begin to awaken– tender buds swelling, bulbs breaking through soil, in reentry to the world from the dark and cold.
Like a mother holding the mystery of her quickening belly, so hopeful and marveling – she knows soon and very soon there will be spring.
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May the wind always be in her hair May the sky always be wide with hope above her And may all the hills be an exhilaration the trials but a trail, all the stones but stairs to God. May she be bread and feed many with her life and her laughter May she be thread and mend brokenness and knit hearts… ~Ann Voskamp from “A Prayer for a Daughter”
Nate and Ben and brand new baby LeaDaddy and Lea
Mommy and Lea
“I have noticed,” she said slowly, “that time does not really exist for mothers, with regard to their children. It does not matter greatly how old the child is – in the blink of an eye, the mother can see the child again as she was when she was born, when she learned to walk, as she was at any age — at any time, even when the child is fully grown….” ~Diana Gabaldon from Voyager
Just checking to see if she is real…
Your rolling and stretching had grown quieter that stormy winter night thirty-two years ago, but still no labor came as it should. Already a week overdue post-Christmas, you clung to amnion and womb, not yet ready. Then as the wind blew more wicked and snow flew sideways, landing in piling drifts, the roads became more impassable, nearly impossible to traverse.
So your dad and I tried, concerned about your stillness and my advanced age, worried about being stranded on the farm far from town. When a neighbor came to stay with your brothers overnight, we headed down the road and our car got stuck in a snowpile in the deep darkness, our tires spinning, whining against the snow. Another neighbor’s earth mover dug us out to freedom.
You floated silent and still, knowing your time was not yet.
Creeping slowly through the dark night blizzard, we arrived to the warm glow of the hospital, your heartbeat checked out steady, all seemed fine.
I slept not at all.
The morning’s sun glistened off sculptured snow as your heart ominously slowed. You and I were jostled, turned, oxygenated, but nothing changed. You beat even more slowly, threatening to let go your tenuous grip on life.
The nurses’ eyes told me we had trouble. The doctor, grim faced, announced delivery must happen quickly, taking you now, hoping we were not too late. I was rolled, numbed, stunned, clasping your father’s hand, closing my eyes, not wanting to see the bustle around me, trying not to hear the shouted orders, the tension in the voices, the quiet at the moment of opening when it was unknown what would be found.
And then you cried. A hearty healthy husky cry, a welcomed song of life uninterrupted. Perturbed and disturbed from the warmth of womb, to the cold shock of a bright lit operating room, your first vocal solo brought applause from the surrounding audience who admired your purplish pink skin, your shock of damp red hair, your blue eyes squeezed tight, then blinking open, wondering and wondrous, emerging and saved from a storm within and without.
You were brought wrapped for me to see and touch before you were whisked away to be checked over thoroughly, your father trailing behind the parade to the nursery. I closed my eyes, swirling in a brain blizzard of what-ifs.
If no snow storm had come, you would have fallen asleep forever within my womb, no longer nurtured by my aging and failing placenta, cut off from what you needed to stay alive. There would have been only our soft weeping, knowing what could have been if we had only known, if God had provided a sign to go for help.
So you were saved by a providential storm and dug out from a drift: I celebrate when I hear your voice singing- your students love you as their teacher and mentor, you are a thread born to knit and mend hearts, all because of a night of drifting snow.
My annual retelling of the most remarkable day of my life thirty-two years ago today when our daughter Eleanor (“Lea”) Sarah Gibson was born in an emergency C-section, hale and hearty because the good Lord sent a wind and snow storm to blow us into the hospital in time to save her.
She is married to her true love Brian– he is another blessing sent from the Lord. Together they have their own miracle child, happily born in the middle of the summer rather than snow-drift season.
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In time the curtain-edges will grow light. Till then I see what’s really always there: Unresting death, a whole day nearer now, Making all thought impossible but how And where and when I shall myself die.
…specious stuff that says No rational being Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound, No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with, Nothing to love or link with, The anaesthetic from which none come round.
Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape. It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know, Have always known, know that we can’t escape, Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun. Work has to be done. Postmen like doctors go from house to house. ~Philip Larkin from “Aubade”
Sharing an essay I wrote during Advent in 2003:
We are in our darkest of dark days today in our corner of the world–about 16 hours of darkness underwhelming our senses, restricting, confining and defining us in our little circles of artificial light that we depend on so mightily.
It is so tempting to be consumed and lost in these dark days, stumbling from one obligation to the next, one foot in front of the other, bumping and bruising ourselves and each other in our blindness. Lines are long at the stores, impatience runs high, people coughing and shivering with winter viruses, others stricken by loneliness and desperation.
So much grumbling in the dark.
Yesterday, I had a conversation with a patient of mine from my clinic at the University Student Health Center, a young college student recovering at the local hospital after a near-death experience. Her testimony made me acutely aware of my self-absorbent grumbling.
Several days ago, she was snowshoeing up to Artist Point with two other students in the bright sun above the clouds at the foot of nearby Mt. Baker. A sudden avalanche buried all three–she remembers the roar and then the deathly quiet of being covered up, and the deep darkness that surrounded her. She was buried hunched over, with the weight of the snow above her too much to break through. She had a pocket of air beneath her and in this crouching kneeling position, she could only pray–not move, not shout, not anything else. Only God was with her in that small dark place. She believes that 45 minutes later, rescuers dug her out to safety from beneath that three feet of snow. In actuality, it was 24 hours later.
She had been wrapped in the cocoon of her prayers in that deep dark pocket of air, and miraculously, kept safe and warm enough to survive. Her hands and legs, blackish purple when she was pulled out of the snow, turned pink with the rewarming process at the hospital.
When I visited her, she glowed with a light that came only from within –somehow, it had kept her alive.
Tragically, one of her friends died in that avalanche, never having a chance of survival because of how she was trapped and covered with the suffocating snow. Her other friend struggled for nearly 24 hours to free himself, bravely fighting the dark and the cold to reach the light, then calling for help from nearby skiers to try to rescue his friends.
At times we must fight with the dark–wrestle it and rale against it, bruised and beaten up in the process, but so necessary to save ourselves and others from being consumed. At other times we must kneel in the darkness and wait– praying, hoping, knowing the light is to come, one way or the other. Grateful, grace-filled, not giving up to grumbling.
May the Light find and rescue you this week in your moments of darkness.
Merry merry Christmas.
The story of the avalanche and rescue is written here in the Seattle Times.
The first thing I heard this morning was a rapid flapping sound, soft, insistent—
wings against glass as it turned out downstairs when I saw the small bird rioting in the frame of a high window, trying to hurl itself through the enigma of glass into the spacious light.
Then a noise in the throat of the cat who was hunkered on the rug told me how the bird had gotten inside, carried in the cold night through the flap of a basement door, and later released from the soft grip of teeth.
On a chair, I trapped its pulsations in a shirt and got it to the door, so weightless it seemed to have vanished into the nest of cloth.
But outside, when I uncupped my hands, it burst into its element, dipping over the dormant garden in a spasm of wingbeats then disappeared over a row of tall hemlocks.
For the rest of the day, I could feel its wild thrumming against my palms as I wondered about the hours it must have spent pent in the shadows of that room, hidden in the spiky branches of our decorated tree, breathing there among the metallic angels, ceramic apples, stars of yarn, its eyes open, like mine as I lie in bed tonight picturing this rare, lucky sparrow tucked into a holly bush now, a light snow tumbling through the windless dark. ~Billy Collins “Christmas Sparrow” from Aimless Love
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But this morning we wake to pale muslin stretched across the grass. The pumpkins, still in the fields, are planets shrouded by clouds. The Weber wears a dunce cap and sits in the corner by the garage where asters wrap scarves around their necks to warm their blooms. The leaves, still soldered to their branches by a frozen drop of dew, splash apple and pear paint along the roadsides. It seems we have glanced out a window into the near future, mid-December, say, the black and white photo of winter carefully laid over the present autumn, like a morning we pause at the mirror inspecting the single strand of hair that overnight has turned to snow. ~Robert Haight “Early October Snow”
No snow here in the northwest yet this fall, but when we visited family in Denver last year during the last week of October, heavy snow had fallen overnight, then gone within a day.
It did not stay. But it did return.
I can catch a glimpse of the future if I pay attention. Sometimes it is too painful to acknowledge, so I quickly look away. That one thick white hair discovered at age 28 is now a full head of thin white at 70.
I need to be courageous about looking straight ahead through the veil of snow at how change takes place, whether it is the melting piles on the pumpkins, or the mop of white in the mirror topping my wrinkles.
And so it goes and so it goes…
It is as it is meant to be. It is as it must be. I wouldn’t have it any other way.
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Perhaps as a child you had the chicken pox and your mother, to soothe you in your fever or to help you fall asleep, came into your room and read to you from some favorite book, Charlotte’s Web or Little House on the Prairie, a long story that she quietly took you through until your eyes became magnets for your shuttering lids and she saw your breathing go slow. And then she read on, this time silently and to herself, not because she didn’t know the story, it seemed to her that there had never been a time when she didn’t know this story—the young girl and her benevolence, the young girl in her sod house— but because she did not yet want to leave your side though she knew there was nothing more she could do for you. And you, not asleep but simply weak, listened to her turn the pages, still feeling the lamp warm against one cheek, knowing the shape of the rocking chair’s shadow as it slid across your chest. So that now, these many years later, when you are clenched in the damp fist of a hospital bed, or signing the papers that say you won’t love him anymore, when you are bent at your son’s gravesite or haunted by a war that makes you wake with the gun cocked in your hand, you would like to believe that such generosity comes from God, too, who now, when you have the strength to ask, might begin the story again, just as your mother would, from the place where you have both left off. ~Keetje Kuipers “Prayer” from Rattle #28, Winter 2007
These autumn days will shorten and grow cold. The leaves will shake loose from the trees and fall. Christmas will come, then the snows of winter. You will live to enjoy the beauty of the frozen world, for you mean a great deal to Zuckerman and he will not harm you, ever. Winter will pass, the days will lengthen, the ice will melt in the pasture pond. The song sparrow will return and sing, the frogs will awake, the warm wind will blow again. All these sights and sounds and smells will be yours to enjoy,Wilbur — this lovely world, these precious days … ~E.B. White (Charlotte talking to Wilbur) from Charlotte’s Web
Each passing moment is precious, as time flows relentlessly.
We, on a linear trajectory from birth to death, bear witness to the cycling of the seasons while earth spins and orbits through space.
The story of me, and the story of you, is not yet finished. While our heads nod, our eyelids become heavy, the Author is turning the pages, reading resonant Words that define our days.
We pick up where we left off, wanting to hear the next unknowable chapter. We try to stay awake, eager to see what comes next.
We aren’t quite ready to fall asleep, not yet. Not yet…
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We are surrounded by acres of farmland, blessed by neighbors hard at work cherishing the land and buildings and animals they own. They don’t take anything for granted and strive to preserve a heritage of good stewardship. Even so, they know when to sit back to appreciate the rhythms of the seasons.
There is joy in simply watching time pass by.
The land continues to teach us all, through the sweet springs, the sweaty summers, the colorful autumns and harsh winter winds. We need each other when the snow drifts high on our driveways, the power goes out, the well runs dry, or the garden produces far more than we can just use ourselves.
And when the sun sets — well, we watch it with awe.
Another day of letting it go, grateful for what our gentle neighbors share with us – those who are next door, those just down the road, and I’m daily reminded of the generosity of those of you who take the time to stop by to read these words and say howdy.
To live in this world
you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it
against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go. ~Mary Oliver, “In Blackwater Woods”
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Here in the time between snow and the bud of the rhododendron, we watch the robins, look into
the gray, and narrow our view to the patches of wild grasses coming green. The pile of ashes
in the fireplace, haphazard sticks on the paths and gardens, leaves tangled in the ivy and periwinkle
lie in wait against our will. This drawing near of renewal, of stems and blossoms, the hesitant return
of the anarchy of mud and seed says not yet to the blood’s crawl. When the deer along the stream
look back at us, we know again we have left them. We pull a blanket over us when we sleep.
As if living in a prayer, we say amen to the late arrival of red, the stun of green, the muted yellow
at the end of every twig. We will lift up our eyes unto the trees hoping to discover a gnarled nest within
the branches’ negative space. And we will watch for a fox sparrow rustling in the dead leaves underneath. ~Jack Ridl “Here in the Time Between” from Practicing to Walk Like a Heron
We live in an in-between time: we see the coming glory of spring and rebirth yet winter’s mud and ice still grasps at us.
We want to crawl back under the blankets, hoping to wake again on a brighter day.
Praying to emerge from the mud of in-between and not-yet, we are ready to bud and blossom and wholly bloom.
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My sorrow’s flower was so small a joy It took a winter seeing to see it as such. Numb, unsteady, stunned at all the evidence Of winter’s blind imperative to destroy, I looked up, and saw the bare abundance Of a tree whose every limb was lit and fraught with snow. What I was seeing then I did not quite know But knew that one mite more would have been too much. ~Christian Wiman “After a Storm” from Once in the West: Poems
Though a weak branch strains mightily to bear a summer’s bounty of fruit without breaking, it will sustain the load.
Then comes winter wind and ice storms and a snowflake becomes the mite too much.
Even so, a painful pruning is endured, when even the strongest limbs are trimmed back, urged to fearlessly grow on and be more fruitful.
I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener. He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful. John 15: 1-2
This Lenten season I reflect on the words of the 19th century southern spiritual hymn “What Wondrous Love is This”
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