drowning out gray

"To love someone is to show to them their beauty, their worth and their importance." — Jean Vanier

Your Beauty

The sway of the longest arms, under shirt sleeves rolled up, athletic, tall, yet turned in to everyone he meets, with blue, the friendliest eyes I know - all such a blessing. I love you for inside, but I'm the outside called to me (and calls to me) so loudly, like a magnet. I see you.

Your Worth

Your value is in being Ralph - a man who holds family and friends so heavy, but lifts them up, a man not afraid to just have fun, a man who lights up the people around him, who works at his work with pride and diligence. A man. To me the most valuable of God's creations, the most precious.

Your Importance

I see you, and you were the first to truly see me. Blessing bowls me over, and I am thankful you picked me, even noticed me, that you walk with me. Without you babe it's all gray.

Your Ev

day 2 at the cup

I am here again, this time ready with a cinnamon roll. May God bless the writing that comes today. Amen.

J.R.R. Tolkien

"It's the job that's never started as takes longest to finish."

Dear Dell,

I found out today that on June 6th we're breaking up. While this isn't the end of the world, somehow I'm miffed. How is it that we got to be so connected? Breakups are rough--I know from experience. This fall when I had to pry myself away from Mac--with all of our shortcuts and personalized settings--I didn't want to go, but knew I had to, and even though I didn't want you at first--after all you weren't him, we've really gotten along swimmingly even after our rocky start. I'm not crazy about you like I was Mac, and yet we seem to co-exist daily in such a way that I didn't realize how attached we've become.

I pray that this will somehow feel okay, that life will go on and that someone new will come to love the curve of my hands, but right now I'm topsy-turvy over it and wondering at writing a dissertation on keys that feel like a poorly tailored dress.

So, here's to us and our short-lived romance. My mantra makes it manageable. All will be well. All manner of things will be well.

begin it

"Whatever you think you can do or believe you can do, begin it.Action (boldness) has magic, grace and power in it." - Goethe

sunday afternoon

Yesterday I was laying on the couch reading. Small nudge. . . go outside.

"But. . . it's hot, and I'm so comfy. . .but. . . oh well."

Sat outside, wrote, read.

Found four birds nests under our deck and realized my lilacs have actually grown.

I need to train myself to listen to those nudges.

cold coffee

My grandpa used to drink cold coffee in the afternoon--at least that's what somebody told me. A warm pot in the morning, cold on ice after lunch.

He was a big man in my memory, and I'm not sure how much I'm piecing together from pictures, and how much is real. I was only nine when he died.

But I do remember Key overalls with Kodiak chew in the front pocket. . . and in his lip. His shock white comb-over would blow up like a gusting flag in the breeze and then settle back down all in one piece. When he would come in the house and take off his tall mesh-backed John-Deere hat, his hair would flop out crazy like Doc's on Back to the Future. Grandpa's one-handed quick smooth over assured him it somehow looked better. It didn't, not really.

I wish I could remember more.

One memory has clear colors. It was in the early morning, and stood the bottom of the stairs with a window at my right hand side. I bounced down the stairs that morning never thinking--

Mom said he died the night before. Next I'm sitting on the counter at my grandma's house in town. Dad comes in and hugs me, crying--only one of two times that I can remember. Maybe he has more, but I only know two for sure. I wonder how hard it is to lose your parent. I wonder how you go on when everything has to be so rough-edged. I wonder if Dad thinks he's like his dad. Does he miss him? What were they like together when Dad was little? I wonder. Were they friends, or was it more--I'm the parent, you're the kid. I wonder if Grandpa had the same scarred, thick hands.

I only see glimpses of this man who was my Grandpa. I can't really say I knew him enough to know him now. Once I met an old guy in Auburn who drove an old white pick-up with wood boards in truck bed. He put it together who my grandpa was, and he looked off a little and smiled. "Ole Elmer," he said, "Elmer was a good 'ole boy. He'd come in to town and play cards 'purt near every day. . . Elmer was a good 'ole boy."

I don't know a whole lot about this man, but I like cold coffee too. Ralph and I haven't played cards in awhile. Maybe we should.

room to write

I tried to write in the living room today.

Didn't work.

So I hodge-podged this little nook.

Sure, it's just an old sewing table, a card table, some boxes covered with a table cloth, and old picture from I'm not sure where. But Lucie seems to like it.

Me too.

At least it's a space to write.

birthday of the D

Today my dissertation was born. She's a little thing so far, kinda messy--like scribbly lines adorning a high-lighted page, but I like her. She's taking more form in Word as she is now in an outlined document (Didn't know how to do this before today). While the birthing was slow, and I sat looking at my coffee cup and the ends of the sleeves on my navy Cardigan, overall, once I got in the flow. . .the birthing wasn't painful, it's just that there really is some doing to it.

Whispers from Day 1:

Each day I am terrified, but I move.

Write a true sentence.

Write what you know.

Keep praying.

This feels real.

Coffee, Candle, Pencil.

Thanks for the outline idea.

Encourage the cohorts.

I am not writing for him.

I can't do it all. . . focus.

Save backup at noon and end in two places.

Come up with your own word. Own this.

Write for fun/blog first.

Four hours is quite a bit.

Keep reading. Keep listening. Keep learning.

Although there is doing to be done, writing for me is somehow spiritual. I read in a blog this week, "No one can take away my connection but me." Yes there are going to be harder days than today, but someone once told me at track practice (in his best Tom Hank's impersonation, "If it wasn't hard everyone would do it. The hard is what makes it great." Day 1 in the books. Thanks for answered prayers.

so it begins

“Wanting to know where we are going is often how we fail to go anywhere at all.”

Julia Cameron, The Sound of Paper

I have done everything possible to do. . . other than really starting. I have written a blog post, I have done my work, I have pre-writing, I've read, I've researched, I have data. I've written why this topic inspires me. I've even written this.

Now it begins. I don't know where it's going, but I'm trusting the process. I'm trusting Anne Lamont's advice to "get my butt in the writing chair." I'm praying that I might have something to say that is of practical value, but also something that isn't practical at all--but inspiring somehow. I love teaching. I love faith. This is what I know.

My goal is simple, to write the truest sentence I know, and work everything else around it. Lord please bless my efforts and help me to have the confidence needed to do this thing that I know I'm incapable of doing. . . alone. Amen.

spring evening

we grilled kabobs

I cut

he grilled

small pieces, soaked in spice

lined up

blackened edges

withold

squish and crunch

good beer, no breeze, sun

the calendar full

I cringe at the to do's

evenings gone

plans made

until far out

sit the white boxes

I settle smile knowing

skewers weren't listed

blue valentine

Saturday night . . . by myself.

The decision of what to do is heavy for a gal like me who usually skips through social events and dinners by deferring to someone--usually my husband--or anyone who will choose.

On mother's day when my mother-in-law just couldn't pick a restaurant, I laughed, but shuffled my feet glad I didn't have to choose. Tonight it's just me, so I muster guts and ask myself, "Just what is it that YOU want to do with this evening?"

I could waffle, but I force movement instead. I grab the Wendy's Baja salad I've been wondering about and snuggle into my quilt to rent Blue Valentine, feeling only slightly guilty at the rental charge for just two eyes instead of the usual four, but justifying it knowing the other two eyes would veto this selection.

To write about this film is to come up terribly short, but it chronicles the unwinding of a marriage--so real that I see glimpses of my failed high school relationship and hard times my husband and I have moved through. With scenes this real, the film sits seductive, and only after the slowness of the final scene--him walking away from her with fire crackers exploding in the backlight--do I realize what it's shaken. Two days later I'm still puzzling over it--the mark of a good film--but the puzzling veers my thinking about marriage into thoughts I will not think.

In so many ways this film looms with truth. And yet it's gravity is feelings. Perhaps it's a comment on our generation--everyman and everywoman somehow running after the elusive stay-quality of love butterflies and all that gush. I'm mad at this art statement. I'm mad it makes me wonder if marriage can work. I'm mad that the truth for me--the working at it probably wouldn't make a very good movie.

But the working at it makes good life, and this morning as I groggily force my eyes to open up to twin toothbrushes blue and pink, and I see how the story ends differently. . . for us.

this summer, my sacrifice

This summer I will give up days at the pool, lunches with friends, trips that I should really take. . . Instead I will glue these fingers to this keyboard, I will turn my sails toward sentences and a Word Document--in an uncomfortable marriage. The type of marriage that could never last a lifetime, but for a season somehow possible.

For fifteen weeks, I will write like mad. I will squish words, soak words, and breathe words, until the work is done, until I can stand--perhaps not at perfection but at completion and somehow a bit more road wearied. With each Friday night will come summer and a reward that waits.

I will hate it, and yet somehow I will find immense joy in the struggle, and I will still have a summer. I will still live this summer, and yet in a state of immersion, I will purge myself of this task--this check mark that I must complete for my own sanity and well being. And next summer. . . oh next summer. . . the sacrifice won't seem quite so painful, nothing but a memory.