I thought I had emptied the coffee pot already. It turns out I was confused with yesterday. So when I put the coffee-maker away, it tipped sideways and spilled all over: inside, outside, upside down my pots and pans and bags of potatoes, into the nether reaches of my cupboard. So of course I took a quick moment to swear roundly before getting a towel. “Dammit!” 

 

“Hello?” a sweet, unsure little voice called from my screen door. Whirling around, I beheld the small daughter of our lovely Mormon neighbors, who would not only never swear, but would never ever have brewed any coffee to begin with. 

 

Oops.

Peter wrote in his journal tonight:

Morning Surprises

This morning I woke up and thought that it would be nice to surprise Mom by getting everyone up and ready for church. I guess it payed off. Mom cleared all of our demaret [demerit] cubes and we had one of the most calm and peacefull days of my lif.

True story. It felt like I was living a chapter from some idyllic storybook. The kind where they leave out all the gritty details. I couldn’t believe it was really me waking to sunshine and birdsong, with nothing to do but shower and usher my already clean and fed family to the car. You bet I cleared all those demerit cubes! And baked them cookies, and let them play video games...

Leave me here with my Lord. Leave me with my grief.

Take your kind, awkward Sunday words someplace else this Friday.

Give me room to weep and rend my heart. Stop talking about resurrection for a minute. Just for a minute, stay quiet with me at his tomb.

 

I could not watch with him an hour; I could not keep my fast with him a full season. 

I may at least adore his broken body. 

 

I will sing with you on Easter morning. I promise to rise up in your congregation and bless the living God with a thousand blessings. I promise to lift up my face, radiant in a joy impossible without grief. 

 

Don’t rush me. I know Sunday’s coming, but right now it’s still Friday.

 

 

We trooped in late to evening Mass on campus, disheveled after a day of muddy tag. Thomas’ hand was bandaged to the hilt, and there were a few naps skipped. Looking down the long row of wiggly, whispering children, I saw Steven capping the far end and solemnly tuning out the kids’ commotion as deftly as I (perhaps more deftly than our poor neighbors).

His face so dear, every line so familiarly loved, the quick shift of shoulder and mouth, so perfectly known but rarely thought of. And the question came with a gaspy sort of inside laugh, “How did we get here?” 

All those children, all that knowing and loving and life: it just happened along the way. I felt so old and happy, but not a bit wise. Just sort of gladly ridiculous among the surrounding sea of bright young college faces.

 

I admire nurses with an ardency reserved for the wholly other. They are so competent, their fingers deft, their manner quick and sure. So many doors of usefulness and blessing open to them, from inner-city clinics and overseas emergency relief to church nursery assistance (where they managed to staunch Thomas’ wound) to yes, even the children’s hospital a few miles away, where they effortlessly sewed up his finger and made him smile into the bargain. (How does one draw such gushing cataracts of blood with round-ended Sunday School scissors, I ask you?)

When I muse on what I might have been in some alternate universe, nursing tops the list. To be so helpful and practical, so wanted. 

But there are few vocations, perhaps with the exception of waitressing, for which I am worse equipped. Among the many friends and relations who love me patiently and cheerfully endure the chaos of my wake, there are none who would in any time of crisis call out, “Quick: get Ellie! She’ll fix everything!”

I’d better stick to poetry and admire all those hands-on, competent people from afar. As long as I keep out from underfoot they’ll like me fine, and maybe in a fit of usefulness I could read to their patients and roll bandages. Even smooth a fevered brow or two. But I insist on a jazzy white skirt and cap.

Breakfast cereal is a dismal excuse for a metaphor. Especially when referring to human beings. And used so tediously often... as in:

“I wouldn’t eat the same thing for breakfast every morning.”

Why can’t we use, say, books as our metaphor? People are so much more like books than they are like convenience food. Really good books, too. Rich layers of meaning and delicately interlacing plot lines. Multifaceted characters peppering our back stories and informing our presents. Themes, archetypes, heroics and villainies; empty moorlands and steamy jungles and quiet firesides all together landscaping one complex soul. 

And there’s another thing. Breakfast cereal is chosen, dominated, and consumed at our good pleasure. Which makes it very safe. But persons are encountered only at our peril: we are changed and formed, and our pages scribbled on, or even torn.

I think it would be so lovely to leave little manuscript illuminations in everyone’s margins: gold and green dragons, and kings with curly beards and pointy red slippers.

There really are books deeply satisfying enough to spend a lifetime on. Marriage teaches us to reread.

Steven chuckled at my theory and told me that even his favorite books have bits he’d rather skip over, but that was only moments after I’d pulled the covers up sideways (which is a particular peeve of his) so I am discounting that viewpoint entirely.

My parents live atop a hill so steep that the road to it should qualify as a black diamond ski-slope. My heart beats wildly and my knees shake whenever I pull into their garage, and I sit for a long moment in the driver’s seat, keys dangling from a silent ignition, thankful that I and my passengers are still in one piece.

Yesterday Thomas and William were helping to haul fallen logs from the backyard.  It was manly work, with plenty of grunting and deep-voiced camaraderie and rides to and fro in the all-terrain garden wagon until the moment these two mighty woodsmen of eight and six swaggered into the kitchen and announced that the last pile of logs couldn’t be moved because there were too many slugs. Their gray-haired granny had to sort that one, and what with one thing and another, the wagon was left out.

Several calm and peaceful hours later, as I sipped some tea and congratulated myself on a day well gotten-through, I was surprised to hear Polly having a fit of absolute hysterics in the driveway. 

Nick sat halfway down the hill, white-faced and weeping, next to an overturned green wagon. Neighbors (none of whom I had ever met) poured from their doors, one even trying to phone an ambulance (which was a little premature, since Nick was surprisingly whole.) It was a lot to take in all at once. 

Of course, they had been giving each other rides. And of course, they had never meant to hurtle down the hill (though I wasn’t certain at first.) But it’s all fun and games until the handle slips from someone’s little fingers and someone else speeds down, down, down, and they were both so badly shaken by the excitement of it all that their conversation is still sprinkled with references in hushed and holy tones, as though having lived through some cataclysmic Biblical event which has shaped their world forever. 

Which it probably has.  

Nothing is so marvelously fun as a duckpond covered in thin ice. It invites an infinite number of games, most involving sticks and cold fingers and a precarious perch on the bank. And it’s all magically fun and games, of course, until Jack scoots past the dog, who sits down against Polly, who tips off balance and falls in. 

A four-year-old unexpectedly wet to the knees in icy water can, it turns out, be rather a bitter individual. Fortunately, no one else on the planet is cheered so enthusiastically by hot chocolate topped by whipped cream and sprinkles.

Once every year, when the windchill drops so low you have to force yourself out of the car and across their parking lot, the OSU Biodiversity Museum opens its doors to science-enthusiasts of all ages. It is wonderful. 

Real geologists in funny white beards handed my children fossils and meteors and chunks of gold (Thomas’ favorite), carrying even me away in their enthusiasm. 

Fish-loving grad students lit up when Polly squealed happily over some crazy-looking water larvae and chatted about obscure life-cycles as long as we could stay.

Roaches and earwigs skittered over entymologists’ shoulders and under their nametags. I had to stifle a shriek, but William was as fascinated as I’ve ever seen him. Hmm, more bug time in our homeschool...? 

Peter engaged at the art table as he sketched a wasp from a preserved model, and later told me that was his first time really noticing what one looked like. 

Jack plied the botanist with questions about chlorophyll-less plants, and Nick just really, really liked the stuffed owls.

Every homeschooling mother has some area of anxiety. Science happens to be mine. I just wanted to run around to each of those lovely, kooky, enthusiastic experts and ring their hands and say, “God bless you, dear sweet scientist, for being excited about mites, or fossils, or wasps, or owls, or fish, or moss, or what-have-you. God bless you!” But I didn’t. Because that would have been too peculiar, even for the roach man.