Little and Big Me in Yellow

 

This is me, at maybe 3 years old....on the front steps, next to the daylilies that aren't there anymore around the big sugar maple that's gone. The sun was warm and I was wearing my Charlie Brown sweatshirt and matching yellow pants. I still love that yellow.

Its kind of pleasing and comforting to think about the ways that Little Me is still there inside, unchanged, besides my love of yellow and porch sitting. That little girl loved the outdoors best, just like I do, she also loved cooking and all kinds of other helping work. She and I love singing to acoustic guitar, holding babies, long drives in the country and telling people what to do. We love prayer, and church and stories without too many scary parts. We both love corn-on-the-cob, apples with peanut butter, smelling the coffee in the morning and the way bread dough feels in your hands when it starts to get silky from kneading. Little Me loved mornings best, old ladies with soft wrinkly skin on their arms, picking wild fruit and lying on a dog-turned-pillow in a pool of sunshine and I do too.  

My boys tease me because I still like to walk teetering across mossy logs on ponds, pick up seashells like I have never seen one before and stop to peep into every wildflower. They say that I am cute, which is kind of a strange thing to hear from your own offspring, but there we are....I'm cute now. And I think part of what they mean is that they can tell sometimes that I am still Little Me inside. I have no desire to become an entitled diva who runs around demanding what she wants or run from responsibility like an perma-toddler....I have actually always kind of loved responsibility, truth be told. But, I do hope that I will always be able to look at that picture and feel that "me" quite alive and well within the cocoon of my mom costume. So much of the time I feel unqualified for parenthood, adulthood, the role of wife, the job of friend, the duty of citizen....but I feel quite able to be a child. And maybe that's a little immature of me, but I hope it represents a kind of reaching for innocence and joy, a kind of trueness through time, a simple, continuous, remembering sort of humility. Sometimes I feel like backwards is somehow the real way, like I need to remember what I was, and revert for the sake of honesty, maybe even safety. I am sure there are some things I have learned and ways I have done well to cast off what that little girl was and become Big Me, but just now, I can't think of any of them. I might be here doing the laundry and looking reponsible, trotting from the house to the car with the car key, but inside....I'm wondering what make cats ears twitch electrically when you just touch the tips of them while listening to the happy hum of the honeybees in my wildflowers as I trot past, impersonating a mom.

Winter Chill

    It is winter in Northern California and this week that has meant frost on the roofs visible through the back kitchen window....our garage roof, the roof of the apartment building next door, the roof behind our house where the stray kitties sunbathe on occasion and if I lean forward I can see the roof of our next door neighbors who on the left who share our driveway. They all glitter white and shimmery, blueish in certain shadowed angles and impressively opaque. There is a true layer of white, and from certain angles it looks for all the world like true snow. The boys make believe that we have indeed had a wee blizzard and we haul the banana tree and the papaya tree into the kitchen in their gigantic pots and work around their absurd bulk as we wash the dishes by hand because the dishwasher has passed away and is awaiting buriel in the driveway. You have to duck around the papaya to get to the plate cupboard and the banana tree has to be slid to the side to open the low oven door. But there is room for us all and make do is kind of my favorite acoutrement in life

    And then, later in the day the sun comes out and I go out and plant pansies under our lemon tree. Its a funny life and a funny kind of winter. Thing are colder, I drink more coffee, we protect our plants now and then. The tomatoes and peppers  have wilted away into brown sticks, the cauliflower keeps slowly curving new leaves around its inner core which I hope means it is secretely developing a head. We bake more and there a constantly sprinkling of slippers and socks through the whole house as people shuffle in and out on the chilly tile floor of the kitchen. I am holding on for spring which you still need, it turns out, even if your winter is frost on the roof, cold floors and setting mouse traps instead of snow drifts and salting the sidewalk. We all need that blooming warmth and the heart of God draws us back to Himself in the midst of our aching coldness. It sure sounds good to drink in the sunshine and pull it into my bones. I need it, and the revitalization that comes with it. I am always comforted by the turning of the seasons, no matter what dark frosty time settles in and nips the buds off the eggplants, there is some warm beauty coming when the sun comes out.

 

Tuning Back In

I am sitting here at the keyboard in our silent little Orange Blossom Cottage, listening to the occasional far-off whooshing of a car off on the freeway and otherwise, nothing to be heard but the distant burble of the fish tank. 

I have been distant myself, more than I meant to be. Somehow, two years blipped past and I wrote not, shared not and burbled along in the my own little corner, trying to keep the wheels turning, doing dishes and laundry and dishes and laundry as life kept on. Situations kept on oozing into different shapes and the kids kept on growing into new versions of themselves and I kept stacking up post ideas and drafts and snippets of things that drifted across my mind. Things I meant to write about and needed to think about and ought to post about and would love to share and the the pile was so tall that I think it might have slid sideways and toppled down on top of my writer self. Writer-Me may have been here in this dark corner of the house waiting to post, buried sheepishly beneath all those intentions for quite some time now. It's nice to be back.

I am homeschooling 9th grade this year, head-on into high school with enthusiastically interested and yet unabashedly inexpert energy! Ru is reading wonderful classic literature: C.S. Lewis, Ivanhoe, Shakespeare, Defoe and Churchill and the things he is understanding and connecting together impress, delight and underwhelm me by turns. He is still after all, a normal 14 year old boy. Sometimes, he is brilliantly fresh and insightful and sometimes he just misses stuff. I am leaning in toward the promise of life being long, there being seasons for everything, subconscious knowledge still counting and my own role being just a beginning in the long line of teachers and guides he will have in life. My job is not to equip him with the whole body of knowledge, its just to keep his fire going, teach him some habits of discipline, and whet his appetite for the reams of things there are to know and learn. 

Everyone asks me if I am scared to be teaching high school and the truth is I'm not. Its closer to compatriot learning, he can understand and write about and read the things that I am interested in. I can imagine growing into adult friendship and an grown, peer to peer, life-share path. I am sure he will grow up and leave and differ and have areas of his life that he doesn't let me into but, I feel like he is increasingly a whole and separate person looking back at me bringing his own new things into the room and the conversation. Its encouraging and emboldening to me to know that I don't have to know all the things because he is going to be such a different person from me, living in such a different world than the one I grew up in. I also feel encouraged by the fact that his own freedom is allowing him to enrich his own high school experience and by turn our family and the rest of the students below him. 

“Our children should feel that they can peacefully say anything: questions, doubts, criticism, points of view. They should feel that we are genuine interested in what they do and think. We should not deprive them of privacy, but all our words and conduct should encourage an open relationship. One cannot overestimate the value of such relationships.”
― Sister Magdalen

So, that's a little peek into the velvety corners of my inner world in the dark of the night here in California. I hope that you are all well. I have missed you. I hope to pick up the loose threads here and weave onwards, mending the holes and filling in the gaps.