I woke today to a world encased in ice. A glassy vision held stunningly still by the frozen air. The beauty of it took my breath away, as did the treachery I watched as the dogs slipped and stumbled in the undertaking of their morning constitutional.

For a moment I wondered if my heart had brought this upon the earth. If nature had somehow created a mirror image for the numbness that has all but rendered me useless for the last several months.

I watched a small bird fight to free its feathers and understood its agony explicitly. Frozen is a dreadful state to be in. When one gray moment blends into the next it’s hard not to feel hopelessly suspended. I’ve been up against something larger than my will.

The icy suspension brought metaphor, too: The tens of thousands who can’t pay a house note on frozen wages and the freezing of our personal freedoms in the name of safety. Environmental salvation so hard won disappearing into thin, cold air. Children ripped from the arms of parents and teachers with icy zeal in a Nazi-style round up. Yes, perhaps I am not the only one who feels a cold grip upon the very nature of my soul.

Just as it all becomes unbearable, the air outside warms and the stillness gives way to melting water that falls like rain. The ice loses its grip on limb and roof and chunks of it crash to the ground. I close my eyes and pray for a warmth like this to come and free our frozen hearts.

I was out to a lunch buffet the other day and overheard a conversation that disgusted me. Two entitled twenty-somethings were discussing the upcoming holiday (Black Friday). They were mutually annoyed that before they could get around to having their parents order stuff or go shopping for deals they first had to suffer through Thanksgiving.

As they rose several times to refill their plates with what I must say was some pretty awesome Indian food (I do love me some Indian cuisine!), they were openly wishing that they could cherry-pick the food someone would lovingly prepare for them at home like they were doing with the buffet. The cloth napkins there are quite large and I thought about reaching out and swatting the girl, that’s what my grandmother would have done and her words were that 1. spoiled and 2. annoying.

There they were, putting fine food on a credit card that probably gets paid off by Daddy, whining about how long they had to wait to shop and then how they always had to wait until “at least Christmas eve” before they could get the loot they’d asked for. It gave me pause.

I’ve been pausing a lot this Thanksgiving season. It’s been pretty personally hard and I’ve been sorely tempted (and sorrily not always resisted the temptation) to whine about the stuff that’s been happening in my life. But then God keeps giving me conversations that make me hit the pause button.

Like the one I had with a friend whose spouse is undergoing not only dialysis but chemotherapy. Good Lord have mercy. It’s a medical miracle, to be sure, but one that involves so much pain and suffering. And this is a dear, dear person who is doing the suffering. Or the one I had with a stranger whose dog was hit by a car when she opened her door to receive a package and it ran out. Bless her heart. She was walking the lake, by herself, crying the whole way and asked if she could pet Pip. Her dog was a Jack Russell, too.

And then there is a new widow I’m working with who has no one to spend the holiday with and she’s too far away to invite over. She’s dreading it. Is in a countdown for it. Her only son is in the Army and he’s overseas. She fears for him. He’s all she has left of her life. They moved to a new town shortly before her spouse was diagnosed with end-stage pancreatic cancer (a nasty way to go). She knows no one. Doesn’t feel like going anywhere to meet anyone. It’s only been 3 months. How long does this take, she asks?

Maybe you’re not feeling lucky right now, either. Maybe things haven’t been that great for you, either. But you know what? You should still be grateful for all the parts of you that still work and for the blessings you have in your life. Because gratitude is an attitude and it brings good things to your heart.

So get out the magnifying glass and a piece of paper. Write down 10 things you’re grateful for. Do it today. Do it tomorrow. Do it on Thanksgiving. And get ready to feel better. Then go one more. Tell somebody that you’re grateful for them. Maybe it’s just the clerk at the drive-through window, maybe it’s your neighbor or the guy who empties your trash into that monster truck every week. None of us ever get enough gratitude really. We all want to know that we matter. So give that to someone. It won’t cost you a dime.

And it will refocus your heart and your mind on what you have. Which, no matter who you are or what your circumstances are, is a lot.

My rant is done. Happy THANKS-GIVING to you!

When something really bad happens to you (like widowhood, for instance) it’s really tempting to go under the covers and stay there for a while. In fact, I don’t think this is a bad strategy, in the scheme of things. Sure beats sitting around listening to other people tell you what you should do, must do, and so on when whatever it is (like widowhood, for instance) hasn’t happened to them.

Have you ever noticed how much smarter other people get when it’s time for them to solve your problems? Seriously, there they are, muddling through their less-than-stellar lives, bumbling along, confused and stressed out, just like everyone else UNTIL you mention how overwhelming your feelings are (because you’re facing widowhood head on, for instance) and you make the mistake of stopping to take a breath and TA DAH! said persons suddenly leap into your life to try and FIX YOU.

Too bad that doesn’t ever work, right? I mean, why spend all that useless time on personal development and internal skill-sets when you could just let someone who hasn’t done what you are trying so desperately to do fix you? It’s laughable, really, and yet their “help” can keep you from coming out from under the covers and putting on your big-girl pants.

Sometimes these well-meaning people can make you feel like a failure before you’ve even taken one step forward. Just because you say, “I don’t know if I should _____ or ____ ” doesn’t mean you won’t figure it out. It doesn’t mean you won’t find the answer that’s right for you! All that question means is that you are aware of the fact that you have choices.

Choices are good things. Choices are brain-judo you do in the safety of your home gym. The contemplation of choices is essential to the act of crawling out from under the covers after the unthinkable happens. And YOU are the only person who knows which one of those choices is the right one for you, right now. (That’s the cool thing about considering your options, most things are reversible. More on that in another blog.)

So bravo on you for being brave enough to come out from under the covers! Instead of letting someone try to “fix” you, ask yourself cool, contemplative questions, like, “I wonder what it would look like to ___________.” Yeah, that’s the ticket. Because Helen Keller was right, “Life is a grand adventure, or it’s nothing.”

Sarge was my Daddy’s last best friend. I never knew his “real” name, everyone just called him Sarge, which I guess pretty well tells you that he was a career military man. They were the two widowed roosters in a hen house called the assisted living center. They were handsome and ornery but as Sarge said, “We’re too old to do anything about it.” When they moved my Daddy to the nursing unit, he came twice a day, like clockwork, just to say hello. He was a faithful friend until the very end.

After Daddy died, I gave him the lift chair and he played with the remote for hours on end. He put it through its paces like the drill sergeant he was. “Attention!” he’d holler as he pushed the button to go up and then he’d push the button to go down and say “At ease.” It was really funny. He loved that chair.

Like Daddy, Sarge was a child of the great depression and like Daddy, he lost his mother before he turned 9. But unlike Daddy, his father sent him to live with a distant relative, to work on his farm in exchange for room and board. People did that back then—it was how folks survived.

The first Easter Sarge lived on the farm, he carefully lined his Easter basket with field grass, like his mother had taught him, and left it on the stairs for the Easter bunny to find it. But when he ran downstairs on Sunday morning, the basket had a big horse turd in it instead of candy and Sarge said, “That’s when I knew the Easter bunny wasn’t never coming again, Santa Claus neither.” What a cruel joke. What kind of man does that to a child?

Needless to say, he left that farm as soon as he could in the only way that gave him a safe way out: The US Army. Sarge was a hard worker accustomed to sacrifice. The Army needed men like him, men who understood hardship and death. He stayed at it, married a sweet woman from home, and rose to the rank of Sergeant.

He travelled the world with the military and regaled the assisted living hens with stories of his exploits over supper. The two missionary women would try to one-up him but it never worked. He’d seen things—lots of things. “I’ve seen too many things a man shouldn’t have to see and I wish the good Lord would let me forget.” he told Daddy more than once. I guess, in a way, God answered his prayer. Sarge developed dementia and barely knew who he was for a few years before he died.

As Memorial Day dawns, I salute men like Sarge. I salute all the men and women who have seen things no one should have to see so the rest of us don’t have to. They sacrificed themselves on a daily basis so we wouldn’t have to. Sarge, and his fellow soldiers, who lost their minds and limbs and lives serving our country and protecting our freedoms will always be honored in my home and heart. On this weekend when we acknowledge their service, may they know peace.

I hit a bird today. A tiny, sparrow-like mama bird with a pale yellow body flying across the road with a morsel in her mouth. Too late I saw her; too late saw the morsel in her mouth; too late saw her hit the glass and fall to her death on the shoulder of the two-lane country road.

It ripped my heart out to hit her. Red-shouldered hawks have circled our skies for days, gathering meat for their nests, but she’d survived them. She understood the hawks and had probably outmaneuvered them more than once this spring. She’d withstood other predators, too: Squirrels, crows, possums, and coons all enjoy a songbird’s egg. But nothing in her DNA had prepared her to meet a windshield. She never saw death coming.

The little mother was on one of those missions that only another mother can understand; racing through each day, exhausting herself to find food for her young. Her flight path was lo and laser-focused on the first maple in the meadow where generations of mountain songbirds reared their young before her. The meadow was theirs long before the road was ours.

My mind leapt to the nest, to the young who were now without a mother. As I well understand, the death of a parent is a family affair, and I lifted a prayer that they will survive without her. In high contrast to our thoughts of immortality (despite our continued 100% morbidity), wild things live day to day and understand that death is never very far away.

For weeks now the songbirds have greeted me in the morning and their full throated singing has filled my heart with joy. They are such a reminder that new life is rising from the dark cold of winter, that what has been birthed in darkness will soon lift blooms above ground.

This sweet bird’s sudden death was another reminder to slow down and live more intentionally; to hold myself accountable for the precarious balance between humanity (the world’s most invasive and dangerous species) and the rest of nature. Her soft life was a reminder that we, too, face new threats to our survival: poisoned food and water, noxious air, global warming, the marriage of big food and big medicine. (Lord have mercy upon us.) We are all connected, you know. What kills the songbirds kills us, too. Let us remember (before it is too late!) that their songs, our songs, are too valuable to lose.

I was thinking this weekend about legacies. Specifically, legacies of motherly love. One of my nieces gave birth recently and I’ve been ogling the baby’s ever-changing face (along with the other half the world) on Facebook.

My dear son treated me to dark chocolate and a lunch of fabulous Indian food and wrote me one of those heart-felt letters that makes me cry. I save all those so I can cry over them later! (I have one that dates back to kindergarten. It’s a four-word-tear-jerker written in a chubby hand, “I love you, Mommy.”) And then Andy showed up at my door with a big bouquet of flowers and another bar of rich chocolate, which I ate half of, crying over the letter my son gave me.  (I’m thinking Andy is a keeper.)

There were lots of things my mother taught me. And her mother, a mountain matriarch, lived with us for half the year (after she turned 90 and her kids caught her on the roof cleaning her own gutters) and Grandmother taught me a lot as well.

But the memory that came back to me this weekend the strongest was of a dress Mother made me for our family’s debut in a new town. We were moving again. This was a three-year occurrence for Methodist pastors back in the day. We were moving from a very ornate church in a highly cultured town to a not-so-ornate-one in a not-so-cultured southern part of West Virginia.  This church did, however, have three of the richest coal barons in the country on its administrative board. They were known as “The Three Eds” and they ruled the mines, the town and the church.

Now it just so happened that my Dad was involved in the civil rights movement back in the day and was known for preaching some pretty powerful sermons about racism in the church. And before we moved to this town, The Three Eds had paid my Daddy a visit. Just like the three kings, they brought gifts from afar for us kids. Shiny things like what the settlers gave the Indians. And after a delicious meal out (which in those days was a real treat and usually happened a big hotel) they sat down with cigars in the lobby and had a “talk” with my Daddy. They told him they’d been talking with some pretty big people and that it had been decided that he wouldn’t be preaching any of his freedom sermons in their pulpit. They didn’t care what the bishop said. And the appropriations committee that loved to see their checks arrive every year in the denomination’s headquarters agreed with them. Daddy didn’t say much, which surprised me. He wasn’t the silent type.

But the next day, Daddy sent Mother out to the fabric store with a wad of “Mad Money” he’d saved from the previous year’s weddings and funerals. She bought a beautiful piece of fabric for each of us and began to sew frantically. It was only three weeks before we would move to the new church and the dresses were to be ready by then. In the meantime, Daddy contacted the local paper and told them that our family would be available for a photo and interview. Mother sewed with a frenzy and still managed to pack our household with the help of her women’s circle, who seemed to be whispering, hugging her and rubbing her back an awful lot as I look back on it.

Like many of the women of her day, my mother was an excellent seamstress. The dresses had simple lines and elegant details. They were the finest we’d ever had and they were barely finished when we made the move.

We got to town, unpacked and mother set about ironing the dresses and curling our hair. I remember seeing my father in his home office, big reference books in open boxes all around his chair, praying. It didn’t feel like a good thing was getting ready to happen.

The newspaper came and took our picture, us girls in our elegant new dresses with our curled hair, Daddy with his clerical collar and jet black hair that matched his suit. They did the interview and he invited everyone in town to worship the coming Sunday. The article and photograph came out on a Wednesday.

When that Sunday came, his “girls” as he called us, had our hair curled and our new dresses on. We were introduced to the congregation before worship and everyone clapped. I looked at my Mom and she looked back at me. She had soft blue eyes unless she was mad. When she was mad they turned the color of storm clouds and when they looked at me that day they were dark gray. We sat in the front row and I politely folded my hands in my lap. I didn’t know what was going to happen but I wanted to make sure I wasn’t misbehaving when it did.

Daddy began his sermon with these words: “See, I am making all things new.” And then he informed the church that he’d been told that some pretty powerful people didn’t want him preaching his civil rights sermons from that pulpit and that he had been given to understand that he was in the South now, and that things were different there.  You could have heard a pin drop. Then Daddy said that he’d been talking to a pretty powerful person, too, and that the sermon he was about to preach was inspired by prayer with his Lord, Jesus.

When the sermon was over, my mother took us by the hand and lifted us up for the benediction. I wasn’t sure my legs were going to work and I wasn’t sure we would be allowed to walk out of there. But walk out we did and that church became one of the leaders in the civil rights movement. It seems not everyone agreed with “The Three Eds.”

My mother taught me how to stand by your man and stand by what is right on that hot summer’s day and she even made sure I wore a beautiful new dress as she did it. Thanks for making me the woman I am today Mom, I love you!

Like many Christian families, we always put up a nativity scene. Ours was a substantial Fontanini display with elegant figures, a moss-covered shed with angels hanging off of it and a manger for the baby Jesus.  We were married in late November and it was a wedding gift from one of our pastor relatives (we never did figure out which one, we had 8 total and it was left at the reception in a huge box without a card).

After our son was born, we moved the nativity from its traditional location on the mantle to the round oak coffee table so he could enjoy it. He pulled up on the table and then stabilized himself with his chubby hands to look at the nativity his first Christmas.  The next year he was walking and he used the table to cruise all around the nativity. He’d lean against the table to support himself, and then move the animals and shepherds around, giggling with delight.

By year four he was in an excellent preschool program at a nearby Methodist church. I was pleased to hear that the children had seen the life-size nativity scene in the sanctuary. The pastor had even joined them to tell the story of the birth of Jesus.  My husband and I complimented each other on finding such an outstanding pre-school program as we set up the Fontanini on the coffee table that year.

After dinner the next day, when we sat down on the nearby couch to read to our son, we noticed that the baby was missing. (The Baby Jesus that is, ours was sitting in his Daddy’s lap.) “Oh honey,” I said, noticing it first. “You forgot to unpack the baby Jesus.” Our son looked up at him with those huge eyes little kids always seem to have and said, “The baby not there Daddy.” So he promptly handed our son off to me and went to the basement to fetch the baby from the box. He returned a few minutes later, empty handed. “It’s not there, did you drop it under the table?” The three of us got down on our hands and knees and looked around under the table. All we found was a spider and a hairball our cat had puked up. Our son shook his head and said, “The baby not there Daddy.”

The search for the baby Jesus continued for almost a week without success. We finally decided that he must have fallen on the floor the previous Christmas and been inadvertently tossed in the trash with the giftwrap and boxes.  So my husband said he would go to the over-priced lady’s gift shop (the only Fontanini dealer in town) and buy us another one that afternoon.

After we took our son to preschool the next day, we sat down to drink coffee and I said, “Are you going to get a new baby for the crèche, honey?” And he replied, “Oh, I did, it’s in the manger.” I looked at the crèche, looked at him.  “No, honey, it’s not.” Baffled, he blinked his eyes and said, “Well, I put there last night when I got home, where is it?” Confused too, I said, “How should I know? I didn’t even know you had another one!” Like synchronized swimmers, the two of us fell to our knees to look under the table again. No spider, another hairball, no baby Jesus.

When I served our son a snack on the coffee table after preschool, I told him that our new baby Jesus had gone missing. He looked at the crèche, looked at me, shook his head and said very seriously, “Baby not there yet Mommy.” Later that evening we were again reading to him after dinner and his Dad mentioned that he had purchased a replacement baby at the store and that he was now missing, too. Our son shook his head again and said, “Baby not there yet Daddy.”

Privately, we both blamed our big black and white cat, Mr. Kitty, who was notorious for batting things off tables and stealing them, for the baby’s disappearance. As Christmas drew near, we did a room-to-room search for the missing child. He was still MIA when we left for the Christmas eve worship service.

When we got home, we told our son it was time to go to bed. He shook his head and ran to the other room. (This was a fairly common occurrence when he was asked to go to bed, so we didn’t think much of it.) But what happened next was far from common and bordered on the miraculous, as befits the Christmas season.

“Close your eyes everybody!” he ordered from the next room. We complied, smiling those knowing parental smiles as we heard the sound of his pony-like run on the hardwood.  “Be nots afraid!” he yelled with his hands behind his back as we opened our eyes. “The babys is born for you in Beth-la-hams.” And then, he thrust his arms up into the air and said, “Rejoice!” Much to our amazement, in each chubby fist, he held a Fontanini baby Jesus. He grinned, squished them both into the manger, pointed a fat finger at his Daddy and said, “Now the baby born, Daddy! Everybodys rejoice!”

It’s summer, right? The yard needed mowing, the weeds were overtaking the garden, so I went to the beach.  Packed up the car and my son and drove 7 hours across North Carolina to a rented beach house on the Emerald Isle. It’s an awesome place for respite with crystal-white beaches and clear blue-green water. (“That’s probably why it’s called the Emerald Isle Mom,” my son pointed out when I mentioned it, “Boy! You didn’t get a full scholarship for nothin’.” I joked back. It’s an inside kind of joke but we have fun with it. Guessing where he got his brains is another favorite pastime.

Emerald Isle is a family kind of island. Mercifully, the mega condos a hundred floors high have not arrived yet. There’s no McDonalds or Walmart, although it does have a Food Lion (thank you God, since I needed milk and yogurt!). I slathered myself in 50-proof sunscreen and hit the beach less than 15 minutes after I got there. At which point, I found that my son wasn’t the only 20-something celebrating the end of a college year on the beach. I’m not sure how he kept his eyes from falling out from all the teeny-tiny, polka-dot bikinis that ran the surf in giggly packs. The 20-something men accompanying them SHOULD have put on sunscreen. They were attempting to play beach Frisbee while guzzling numerous miscellaneous cans hidden in huggies to cut the pain of their scalded-red sunburns. (Oh shoot, I keep forgetting the proper terms for these things. They keep their cans in “snuggies.” My bad. Huggies are the diapers, now why can’t I keep that straight? It was all I could do not to buy them sunscreen, I’m such a Jewish mother.)

It was probably the best beach trip of my life since I no longer own or wear a bikini nor do I care that I don’t or can’t.  My one-piece and baggy shorts are extremely comfortable and wearing them precludes any worry about the best way to get onto my beach towel and still look sizzling hot. I didn’t have to find the latest shade of hot pink with sparkles for my nails or spend hours grooming myself to wear some tiny, over-priced pieces of cloth the size of a BandAid. Been there, done that, never again.

I pitied the twenty-something girls who spent more time getting ready to go to the beach than they probably spent lying on it. I wanted to hand them a huggie (sorry, snuggie) and remind them that the guys hadn’t spent any time on grooming for the beach. Hello girlfriends, it’s obvious your buddy-boys are focused on drinking cases of beer and are pretty much oblivious to personal grooming issues. I wondered how the girls could watch the Frisbee games and not figure that out. Personally, I was impressed that the guys could still stand up long enough to go out to eat at night. Hey, I give credit where credit is due, you know?

Getting older has its privileges. Relaxed beach time is one of them! I hope your summer is filled with warm days and some sparkling water somewhere!

It’s All Saints day. Softened by a surprise Southern snow, this day for remembering our dead snuggles with me on the couch and watches red leaves swirl onto frozen white ground. What a metaphor.

Remembering outweighs mourning today, although some memories bring a tear. The warmth of the tea cup in my hand reminds me of the warmth of my husband’s hand at the close of each day. We would hold hands and share our day over a glass of wine. He was always late for dinner but never late for wine.  Our slow decompression in the evening is one of the things I miss the most. His aristocratic, Southern way of savoring time calmed my excitable nature. He was very good for me in that way.

All the older folks in my life said, “You need to marry him.” To a person they told me that. Not “should” or “could” or “ought to” but “you need to marry him.”  We were working together, but not dating. Actually, I was dating a prison architect at the time, so maybe that was part of it. (Not an architect serving time but a guy who designed prisons. Specifically, prison common rooms and showers.) The architect was modern and edgy and he lived in a downtown condo with exposed pipes, a steel kitchen and a reclaimed brick wall with a floor-to-ceiling view of the Mississippi as it meandered through downtown Memphis. I have no idea why I dated him, other than the fact that he looked a LOT like Sting, drove a BMW and had incredible taste in restaurants. Perrin’s deep personal integrity and wild-man “I can do anything” spirit trumped the architect’s expensive restaurants and red BMW. I needed the strength of his calm. God has a preference for giving us what we NEED as opposed to what we think we WANT.

One of the spirits snuggling up next to me today is my Mom.  Dad was a pastor, but it was Mom who taught me how to walk a faithful walk. She was a 43-year breast cancer survivor who was supposed to be dead. She and God did everything together and I do mean everything. Now, as a kid, I thought this was nothing short of kooky. When you’re 8 and your Mom is mopping the floor with God it seems a little weird, you know? But when you pass your “Lordy, Lordy, Look Who’s 40” birthday, and you want to reinvent your life and be a storyteller, that Mom who knows how to do everything with God turns into Wonder Woman. She was so supportive of my calling, even when it meant I would lose a lot in the bargain. In fact, she was the first one to tell me that it might cost me, “You’ll probably have to give up everything you hold dear: Your magazine, your life in the city, your friends. But following God will give you things you never dreamed of, too, honey.” How right she was.

They moved with us, taking the small apartment on the back of the house because her cancer had come back, Daddy had Parkinson’s and they could no longer live alone. As her cancer metastasized first one place and then another, I took her everywhere she needed to go and made her favorite meals until she no longer had an appetite. In the last week of her life all she wanted was music, so I sang the whole Methodist hymnal for her. As her energy moved between here and the beyond, the hymns of the faith that she had so loved to play on her grand piano traveled with her. And it was an honor to be there when God came and folded her last breath into his arms in a gesture of utter tenderness.

Daddy came to visit last night, too, as I reclaimed the small closet that was “his” in their old apartment. (I’m converting it from a photo studio back into an apartment.) He sat beside me as I leafed through his old church bulletins boxed by liturgical season: Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Pentecost, Ordinary Time. Another small box held index cards with the lectionary texts in alphabetical order and underneath each one he had recorded various sermon themes in his scratchy hand. His life of preaching in an index box will now go to his other daughter, the one who attends his seminary on a legacy scholarship. I kept his local preacher’s license, issued when he was not quite eighteen. I still remember the story of how he hitched a ride to the district meeting and ended up in a car with the radio star, “Singin’ Sam Rayburn” who tried to convince him to join his radio show as a singing evangelist saying, “Your voice belongs on the airwaves of God!” Fortunately, the Methodists were happy to have him, too. Everyone enjoys a Welsh tenor.

And Perrin has been here all week. The faces of his often famous clients leap from huge gilded frames that are now all over the back of my house awaiting a ride to the frame broker. My husband could sense who people really were and he didn’t stop photographing them until they revealed themselves on film and then he would grin when he got what he needed.

Which brings me full circle to that idea that God gives us what we NEED instead of what we think we WANT. I thought I wanted a man in a red BMW but what I needed was another pastor’s kid, a Southern aristocrat who knew how to savor time and took care of his own. On this day of the dead, as the red and orange leaves fall soft against the snow, I am inspired by the tenderness of love well lived and reminded again that the veil that separates us from the saints is often very thin.

Click here to listen to a song 
from Faith of Our Fathers, my CD dedicated to Perrin and my Dad