Category: Summer

Like An Old Song With Minor Variations

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Just when you’d begun to feel
You could rely on the summer,
That each morning would deliver
The same mourning dove singing
From his station on the phone pole,
The same smell of bacon frying
Somewhere in the neighborhood,
The same sun burning off
The coastal fog by noon,
When you could reward yourself
For a good morning’s work
With lunch at the same little seaside cafe
With its shaded deck and iced tea,
The day’s routine finally down
Like an old song with minor variations,
There comes that morning when the light
Tilts ever so slightly on its track,
A cool gust out of nowhere
Whirlwinds a litter of dead grass
Across the sidewalk, the swimsuits
Are piled on the sale table,
And the back of your hand,
Which you thought you knew,
Has begun to look like an old leaf.
Or the back of someone else’s hand.
~George Bilgere “August” from The Good Kiss

I don’t recognize the back of my own hands – surely they belong to someone else.

How is it possible for my hands to now look like my mother’s did?

It’s only possible now that I’ve lived many summers.
Yet I’m not quite dried up like an old leaf. At least not yet.

This dry spell is over; this morning there is magic in the sound and smell of rain.
Like the old song:
“The bright blessed day
The dark sacred night
And I think to myself
What a wonderful world…”

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An Itsy-Bitsy Life

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There is always an enormous temptation in all of life
to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends
and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end.

It is so self-conscious, so apparently moral,
simply to step aside from the gaps
where the creeks and winds pour down, saying,
I never merited this grace, quite rightly,
and then to sulk along the rest of your days
on the edge of rage.

I won’t have it. 

The world is wilder than that in all directions,
more dangerous and bitter,
more extravagant and bright.

We are making hay
when we should be making whoopee;
we are raising tomatoes
when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus.
~Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Other than a few exceptional circumstances in my life,
I have always played it safe:
living an itsy-bitsy life being a down-home, don’t rock the boat,
work hard and live-a-quiet-life kind of person,
growing hay and tomatoes and a few other things…

My grandparents lived that way, my parents lived that way.
I feel like it is bound in the twists and turns of my DNA.

I do know a thing or two about sulking on the edge of rage,
lost in a morass of seething bitterness about the state of the world.  Yet if I were honest about it, the discontent I feel is all about me, always about me.

I want to have accomplished more to deserve taking up space in my days on earth. But that’s a problem we all have, isn’t it?

We’re unworthy of such unmerited grace as has been shown to us, raising us from the holes we dig for ourselves. 
It is such a pure Gift I wait for,
borne out of God’s radical sacrifice
deserving from me a life of radical gratitude,
even when I choose to live it out a little quietly,
making hay and raising tomatoes.

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Every Cubic Inch of Space

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Why, who makes much of a miracle?

As to me I know of nothing else but miracles,
Whether I walk city streets,
Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky,
Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge of the water,
Or stand under trees in the woods,
Or talk by day with any one I love,
or sleep in the bed at night with any one I love,
Or sit at table at dinner with the rest,
Or watch honey-bees busy around the hive of a summer forenoon,
Or animals feeding in the fields,
Or birds, or the wonderfulness of insects in the air,
Or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of stars shining so quiet and bright,
Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in spring;

These with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles,
The whole referring, yet each distinct and in its place.

To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,
Every cubic inch of space is a miracle,
Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same,
Every foot of the interior swarms with the same.
Every spear of grass — the frames, limbs, organs, of men and women,
and all that concerns them…

What stranger miracles are there?
~Walt Whitman from Leaves of Grass

Everywhere I turn, there is a miracle in the making. I know this deep in my bones, even when our days on this earth are short. I focus my camera to try to preserve it; I search for words to do it justice.

God touches every square inch of earth as if He owns the place, but these square inches are particularly marked by His artistry. It is a place to feel awed by His magnificence.

The strange miracle is that we are here at all: in an instant we are formed in all our unique potential, never having happened before and never to happen again—to become brain and heart and skin and arms and legs. We were allowed to be born, a miracle in itself in this modern age of conditional conception.

The strangest miracle of all is that we are still loved, corrupted as we are. We are still offered salvage, undeserving as we are. We are still gifted with the miracle of grace until our last breath.

How strange indeed. How utterly wondrous.

There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it.
~Gustav Flaubert


There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, Mine!
~Abraham Kuyper

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When Cousins Come to Visit…

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The cousins are coming!
Cousins, cousins. Here come the boys.
Bedlam, mayhem, noise, noise, noise.
Blow up the air mattresses, hide the breakable toys.
Cousins, cousins. Here come the boys.
~John Forster and Tom Chapin “Cousins”

photo of a windy day — photo by Danyale Tamminga
photo of a windy day — photo by Nate Lovegren

When I was growing up, I got to see my cousins maybe once a year but never lived near extended family. It was always an exciting day when the cousins were coming for a visit, or we went to see them. Now as adults, I have sadly lost touch with several of them.

I’m particularly envious of the close relationships between ten cousins growing up on the same farm just down the road from us- essentially they live interchangeably between one house or the other. What a great way to grow up, with two families who will take you in whenever you want a change in scenery or siblings. If you are fighting with a brother or sister, you can hopefully find compatible cousins a few hundred yards away.

Now we have six grandchildren living far from one another. This week they are able to play altogether in the same room in our ordinarily quiet and boring home —-at times it is mayhem and noise noise noise, but wonderful happy giggles and games abound.

It is a perfect time to treasure these family ties between our grandchildren creating as much bedlam and mayhem as possible!

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Treading the Threshold Softly

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Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
~William Butler Yeats from “Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven“

I know for a while again,
the health of self-forgetfulness,
looking out at the sky through
a notch in the valley side,
the black woods wintry on
the hills, small clouds at sunset
passing across. And I know
that this is one of the thresholds
between Earth and Heaven,
from which I may even step
forth from myself and be free.
~ Wendell Berry, Sabbaths 2000

John O’Donohue gave voice to the connection between beauty and those edges of life — thresholds was the word he loved—
where the fullness of reality becomes more stark and more clear.

If you go back to the etymology of the word “threshold,” it comes from “threshing,” which is to separate the grain from the husk. So the threshold, in a way, is a place where you move into more critical and challenging and worthy fullness.

There are huge thresholds in every life.

You know that, for instance, if you are in the middle of your life in a busy evening, fifty things to do and you get a phone call that somebody you love is suddenly dying, it takes ten seconds to communicate that information.

But when you put the phone down, you are already standing in a different world. Suddenly everything that seems so important before is all gone and now you are thinking of this. So the given world that we think is there and the solid ground we are on is so tentative.

And a threshold is a line which separates two territories of spirit, and very often how we cross is the key thing.

When we cross a new threshold worthily, what we do is we heal the patterns of repetition that were in us that had us caught somewhere.
~John O’Donohue from an “On Being” interview with Krista Tippett on “Becoming Wise”

Over a decade ago, someone told me that my writing reflected a “sacramental” life —  touching and tasting the holiness of everyday moments, as if they are the cup and bread of God’s eternal grace and gift.

I allow those words to sit warmly beside me during the hours I struggle to know what to share here.

It is all too tempting to focus on sacrament over the sacrifice it represents.  As much as I love the world and the beauty in the moments I share here, we should explore the “thin places” between heaven and earth, through forgetting self, stepping forth through a holy threshold into something far greater.

I feel so unworthy — in fact, threshed to pieces most days, incapable of thinking of anything but how I feel reduced to fragments. Perhaps those fragments are like the droplets coming from a farm sprinkler at sunset, sparkling and golden despite waning light, bringing something essential to someone feeling dry, parched and dusty.

I may even step
forth from myself and be free.

Then we can walk each other home.

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The Serenity of the Rose

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The serene philosophy of the pink rose is steadying. 
Its fragrant, delicate petals open fully
and are ready to fall,
without regret or disillusion,
after only a day in the sun. 
It is so every summer. 
One can almost hear their pink, fragrant murmur
as they settle down upon the grass:
‘Summer, summer, it will always be summer.’
~Rachel Peden 

It will always be summer
if we let go in the midst of the brief brightness,
when all is glorious. 

No cold winds, no unending days of rain,
no mildew, no iced walkways,
no 18 hours of darkness,
no turning brown with mold and rot.

Let us be strong and serene through all seasons
rather than letting go at the height of summer. 

Let us thrive steady through the hard times
rather than withering at the peak of beauty.

Let us age, let us turn gray, let us wrinkle, and go bald.

It may always be summer — someday — but not yet. 

Not here. Not now.

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You Can Have an Abundant August

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But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown hands
gloved with green. You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old finger on your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back.

You can have the purr of the cat and the soulful look
of the black dog, the look that says, If I could I would bite
every sorrow until it fled, and when it is August,
you can have August and abundantly so. You can have love,
though often it will be mysterious, like the white foam
that bubbles up at the top of the bean pot over the red kidneys
until you realize foam’s twin is blood.

You can speak a foreign language, sometimes,
and it can mean something. You can visit the marker on the grave
where your father wept openly. You can’t bring back the dead,
but you can have the words forgive and forget hold hands
as if they meant to spend a lifetime together.

You can have your grandfather sitting on the side of your bed,
at least for a while, you can have clouds and letters, the leaping
of distances, and Indian food with yellow sauce like sunrise.

You can’t count on grace to pick you out of a crowd
but here is your friend to teach you how to high jump,
how to throw yourself over the bar, backwards,
until you learn about love, about sweet surrender,
and here are periwinkles, buses that kneel, farms in the mind
as real as Africa.

And when adulthood fails you,
you can still summon the memory of the black swan on the pond
of your childhood, the rye bread with peanut butter and bananas
your grandmother gave you while the rest of the family slept.
There is the voice you can still summon at will, like your mother’s,
it will always whisper, you can’t have it all,
but there is this.
~Barbara Ras from “You Can’t Have It All” from Bite Every Sorrow

My pragmatic mother gave up her teaching career for marriage and family so would remind me regularly that I couldn’t have it all:
there was no way a woman can have a husband and children and a farm and a garden and animals and a profession and write and travel and volunteer in the community and not make a mess of it all and herself.

My father would listen to her and say to me softly under his breath: “you do whatever you put your mind to…you know what you are here for.”

They were both right.

The alluring abundance of this life has invited me to want to touch and feel and taste it all, not unlike another woman who was placed with purpose in the Garden to be a side-by-side companion and co-worker. Yet she demonstrated what happens when you want more than you are given and yes, she indeed made a mess of things.

Yet there is this:
despite wanting it all and working hard for it all
and believing I could do it all,
I missed the point altogether.

Life is all gift, never earned.
Life is all grace, not deserved.
It is all August abundance,
it is right now,
sustaining us through the year’s
droughts and floods and storms and drab gray weather.

And there is this:
I know what I am here for.

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Resolving to Grow Again

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Through sere trees and beheaded
grasses the slow rain falls.
Hay fills the barn; only the rake
and one empty wagon are left
in the field. In the ditches
goldenrod bends to the ground.
Even at noon the house is dark.
In my room under the eaves
I hear the steady benevolence
of water washing dust
raised by the haying
from porch and car and garden
chair. We are shorn
and purified, as if tonsured.
The grass resolves to grow again,
receiving the rain to that end,
but my disordered soul thirsts
after something it cannot name.
~Jane Kenyon “August Rain, After Haying” from Collected Poems

August arrives in the dark

we are not even asleep and it is here
with a gust of rain rustling before it…

but in the stillness after the rain ends
nothing is to be heard but the drops falling
one at a time from the tips of the leaves
into the night and I lie in the dark
listening to what I remember
while the night flies on with us into itself
~W.S. Merwin from “Nocturne II” from The Shadow of Sirius

A long-awaited August rain arrives in the night
and like the ground and plants,
I look skyward
letting the clouds weep on me,
cleansing me of dust.

Will I restore like the
brown and dying blade of grass,
turning green and lush in a matter of days?

Is there enough benevolence from the sky
to cleanse and settle my grime,
yielding yet more harvest? 

I thirst for what I cannot name. 
The mystery is, when I’m drenched,
thirst and dust settled,
I’m aching for more.

AI image created for this post
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Weeds are Flowers Too…

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Weeds are flowers too, once you get to know them…
~A.A.Milne from Winnie the Pooh (Eeyore)

What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
~Gerard Manley Hopkins from “Inversnaid”

A weed is a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson from Fortune of the Republic   

I’ve always identified with weeds and wildflowers
more than cultivated blooms.
Even those which are thorny, bristly, spreading willy-nilly.

I too have undiscovered virtues –
I’m fluffy,
I thrive where I’m not necessarily wanted or needed,
I tend to be resilient through frost, drought or flood.  

The wild persistence of weeds inspires me
to just let most of them be, 
though stinging nettles, poison oak and ivy
need to keep to themselves.

Just as a wild beauty lies just beneath their weedy surface,
I try to keep flourishing in harsh surroundings,
a witness to a world bereft of softness.

O let them be left.
O let me be left.

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Each Bright Drupelet

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I eat these
wild red raspberries
still warm from the sun
and smelling faintly of jewelweed
in memory of my father

tucking the napkin
under his chin and bending
over an ironstone bowl
of the bright drupelets
awash in cream

my father
with the sigh of a man
who has seen all and been redeemed
said time after time
as he lifted his spoon

men kill for this.
~Maxine Kumin “Appetite” from Selected Poems: 1960-1990

I’ve always wondered if there was a name
for the small round globe, part of an aggregate berry
like a thimbleberry, raspberry or blackberry –
each so smooth and perfectly formed,
each unique yet a homogenous part of the whole.
Yet if separated all by itself, nearly invisible.

Each is called a small drupe,
or more familiar and lovingly, a drupelet.

Despite such a plain name,
a little drupelet has its own smooth shiny beauty,
a drop of flavor to be savored, unforgotten,
made sweeter by being part of the whole –
even sweeter when redeemed and consumed.

Kind of like us –
each of us a small part of the whole of life –
each sacrificed for a taste of eternity.

Kind of like us…

photo by Nate Gibson

Lyrics: I am a small part of the world
I have a small hand which to hold
But if I stand by your side
And you put your hand in mine
Together we can be so strong and bold

I am a small part of the world
I have a small dream in my eyes
But if I tell you my dreams
And you add your dreams to mine
Together we can reach up to the skies

Hand in hand, dreams combine
Voice with voice, together for all time
Hand in hand, dreams combine
Voice with voice, for all time

I am a small part of the world
I have a small voice ringing clear
But if I sing out for freedom
And you add your voice to mine

Hand in hand, dreams combine
Voice with voice for all time
I am a small part of the world
Take my hand

Writer(s): Jay Althouse, Sally Albrecht

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