Poetry Friday: Three Kings, One Mama and A Poem

Today is a good day to have a brilliant idea. Its Epiphany and Poetry Friday! Today is the final day of Christmas, which in our house means we celebrate by taking down the holiday decorations, putting the house back to order and moving on....but it also means that I want to take the time to actually mark Epiphany itself as a meaningful day, not just as a day to end the meaning. Three Kings Day is when we remember that the Christ child was not just for Bethlehem but for the far-flung world, he was visited by these kings who came from some mysterious,  far-off, not Jewish land.....summoned by stars and irresistible telegraph messages from the sky. Epiphany is a day when we remember the appearing of this celestial "idea" in the sky, the appearing of Christ to the far nations of the world and the appearing of these kings as guests of The Holy Family.

Its a day to celebrate light, as we remember the star that called for inclusion, and Christ who is named Light of the World. We will light our Advent wreath one last time and we will light luminaries outside our door too. Its a day to celebrate guests and remember the role that these strangers had in the story and the part that warmly welcoming them played as The Holy Family opened their door to them and brought them into their house and life. We will chalk our door tonight with a holy blessing for our home and all who come in and go out in 2017. Chalking the door also echoes back to Passover and the many Jewish parents who marked their doors with a sign of protection on that important night. We will also have an apple gallette with a bean hidden in it....that lucky person getting to wear the crown around the house for the rest of the evening, just for fun. And we'll sing a few more carols around the piano and making sure to hit We Three Kings. I'll read the story of the magi's visit at bedtime as fodder for sweet dreams and we'll be off and running towards our New Year, kissing the holiday season goodbye and looking on towards Lent.

I love the church calendar, the way it pulls me into history, the way it marks our whirling round and round and ties our revolutions into sacred time. I love the reminders to tell these stories to my children, to focus on things like blessing our home and remembering light in our lives. I love the cultural habits that bring gentle little traditions to our life and maybe even a sense of who our people are ancestrally.

Epiphany Song

On this day of eureka,
Bright ideas, lit by starlight
Infuse amongst us like
The fragrant smoke of incense
Let us know clearly.
There is an open door with a
Blessing sifting onto the heads
That enter, like chalk dust
Filtering down in a beam of sun,
Let us love each soul.
We look for the exotic among us,
The sage voices of other lands,
People baring their hearts of gold
Hands fragrant with scents of love.
Let us seek freshness.

The prettiest pastry we ate this year, inspiration for our Epiphany pastry!

Enjoy the collection of other poetry contributions, some original and some inspiration from greats at our host site this week Teacher Dance.

Storms and Sniffles

Spending a rainy day in today. There's a terrific wind outdoors bending the tops of the tall trees in the neighborhood. We were out this morning with our homeschool co-op pals and as we drove home the road was littered with fallen leafy branches blowing around in circles. We are supposed to get a big rain to boot but so far we've seen nothing but clouds and a lot of big gusts. We've got a crazy level of humidity today which makes me glad that I pre-baked dinner last night to make co-op day easier on myself.

The nice thing about stormy days pre-rain is that they always bring really interesting light. Fascinating to watch how different colors look in the changing palette we have coming in through our windows. These are lipstick pink chard stems....kind of a late summer echo of the rhubarb stalks. Great colors, right?

Baby Pom is sniffling away from a little cold. Although he is being very resolute in spite feeling stuffy and having a very pint-sized and tragic, little cough. I think we will spend tonight nursing in the rocker and propping him up on a stack of pillows between sessions. Time to get out the Vicks and drink extra cups of tea after the sun goes down to keep up with the milk demand.

Afterglow

Our dining room, here in our rehab-project colonial is in exactly the right spot to receive somewhat mystical evening sunshine, exactly as dinner is being served. It's a wonderful thing, as thought some thoughtful someone has zoomed in on your table and is spotlighting each dish as you serve it. Makes me look forward to cooking, and have a boost of energy and goodwill on nights when I drag myself to the kitchen.

In other news, we are back home from our family reunion with A's extended relations in Yellowstone National Park, and our family is one pair of cowboy boots richer. Ru and Dee picked them out together since they'll be hand-me-down treasures after our biggest boy is done wearing them. Was secretly very pleased that they wanted the viney stiching ones. :)

The trip was one of our personal best as a nuclear family, only one small interpersonal melt-down which was pretty briskly mended and overall low stress/high enjoyment. The extended cousiney, relative type interaction was well above par and left everyone with a much fonder regard at the end of it all.

We all were somewhat frantically counting the years until the next big get-together and thinking "Three years??? Too long....how else can we see these people?" You know you have a cool family if???? A has cool family. I feel lucky to be along for the ride. And I do hope that we end up getting at least one round of house guests out of the week together. There is also talk of a wild, bluegrass tour with the rels, sometime in 2013. Am dreaming about that!

The Grey Part of Spring

Our speckled orchid, blooming in the sunroom window.

I was talking on the phone the other day to Mama (Big Grandma in the sidebar to your right) and she mentioned hoping that their recent trip to South Carolina to visit my sister, Lockbox (see the sidebar again for her) wouldn't sour them on the dregs of winter that they had to go back home to in Northern Michigan. Now that I am so newly returned from parts further south myself I have to admit to being pretty hungry for the vibrant colors of warmer weather too. I understand, Mama, even if I didn't head home to two feet of snow and maple syrup season.

Our fig tree, making a baby fig.

There isn't a flake of snow anywhere on our third of an acre but spring is still dragging out very slowly. We're living in those long cold days that hang heavily and greyly over everything...a dim, dirty light is all we seem to get for days on end and my photographer's eye is just hungry for some clean bright light, some warmth, some vibrant living thing.

My birthday plant, a little Meyer lemon, blooming (smells amazing!)

Yesterday I went out in the yard to check on the hyacinths (leftovers from the kind previous owner) and we found them up but producing only straggling buds mostly in white and pale pink. Monday is never a good day, I am prone to rash and irrational thought patterns. I gave up on the garden, and spring, and all plant life. And then A and I promptly had an argument. Overtired much?

Darned if the coffee plant isn't looking like its making flower buds again. See em?

Today, a night of sleep under my belt, marriage re-assembled and a little bit of light slurping through the morning blanket of grey I decided to take stock of the garden again and get re-inspired. One does not give up on the garden in the spring. It is just not done.

A single, tiny blue squill blooming in our backyard...one of my favorite spring flowers.

I was surprised what I found in the yard after a little investigation. There's a surprising amount of life and color starting to show. And folks, I have to tell you that it really looks like we're going to get great blooms on our inherited lilac! I am super excited.

Big fat, lilac buds.

All enthused, I decided to play hooky from my painting group and headed out to scope some local garden centers instead.

Lenten rose, blooming at the nursery.

Endless flats of pansies.

I can never resist the purpley pinky ones. They're my favorites.

There is something so boosting about garden centers, greenhouses, public horticultural centers and those tall, spinning racks of seeds in the hardware store....even if all of them tend to make me spend more money than I like to admit. Spending money on living things somehow seems less evil than many of the spendthrift possibilities.

My new watering can.

I found the perfect watering can (which I've been looking for for a good while), bought some pansies, and loaded up on crabgrass pre-emergent for our lawn. And bought, um....only a few dozen packets of seeds.

A straggling, but alive lemon yellow primrose.

Tiny purple veined violets which are blooming in our lawn!

I think I'm gonna make it. And until the real sunshine shows up, I'm drawing forsythia...sunshine on paper for foreshadowing.

Related articles

• A morning communion (mentalflowers.wordpress.com)
• Spring Rites (bethtrissel.wordpress.com)
• Hope (kristinvonkreisler.wordpress.com)
• can a Johnny's seed catalog cure depression? (1veggieatatime.wordpress.com)

Poetry Friday: Between The Seasons

Happy Poetry Friday!

This photo isn't sunrise (like I wrote about in today's poem) it's sunset but it is April and it captures the warm, glowing feel I'm missing in our current season. Am totally jumping the gun mentally at the moment and living one month hence. Spring, you can not come fast enough...I am so ready.

That said, today's poem comes out of a deep, little corner of my self that knows that all things exist for a reason and all bits of creation have purpose and beauty and innate use, even early March. This afternoon Ru said to me, with this sweet, open face: "Mommy? What are leaches good for?" And then there was a long mommy-pause. Leaches are one of the very few animals that I deeply detest. But I want him to appreciate and value all of creation, not just the glamorous members like the nautilus and the zebra. So, yeah...even the lowly leach has a purpose and a value, and it's good at something...something I have yet to discover. I told Ru we'll head right to Wikepedia when I get the chance and read about them to see what they are good at because I just didn't know. And I will force myself to pay attention to the beauty of the now, even if now is frigid March. What exactly is March good at?

A Missed Interlude

The light had a way of crescendo-ing
April daybreak so that she realized
The dismissed tinkle of last month's
Icicles had been a kind of prelude.



In the meantime, to help the chill weather time pass faster, we have company for the weekend! I will be writerly absent tomorrow and Sunday but will rejoin you all on Monday, tuned up with fresh ideas, inspiration, conversation and laughter. Concentrated time with friends is good for my blog, no two ways about it.

And now, I'm off to make up the guest bed! Hop yourself on over to The Small Noun, a first-time Poetry Friday host, to find other participants, posting their poetic thoughts today.