Autumn brings with her a torrent of colors and emotions. I am not a stranger to either. I said last year that I am autumn and I mean it again this year. I think there is always the awareness that I am in a living limbo, but never more than when September hits. Life hits squarely and I work my fingers and heart every waking moment.

Today I pause, sort of, at a table with people I like. They tease me and beg me to stay longer, sit with them and laugh, befriend. Be friend. I say flippantly that their flippant words hit a chord, but I still get up and leave.

Because, I say to another later, because I am afraid.

I live in a place that is a passing through place. Somehow my passing through turned permanent, but mostly, they all just pass through. We call our church a sending church, which is an exciting thought, but partly just a salve to our souls when we "commission" people called elsewhere.

We are a sending church, but we keep sometimes too. And I am kept.

I don't know why. I don't know why I taste other nations, other cultures, other states, and other families, and why none tastes like home like here. I don't know why when everything else in my head feels upside down, here, with all its foibles and opportunities to fall flat, still rights my equilibrium. I don't know why I am so convinced that being faithful with the small things is still radical. And I don't know why I am kept here.

But I am.

And maybe it seems that being kept isn't such a great thing. Like a kept girl or a kept marble, a kidnapped child or a secret memento. Horded. Tucked. Hidden. Captive.

But today I meditate on the Keeper of my soul--the real home of my heart. I think about what my Bible calls A Song of Ascents. I lift my eyes up, off the green hills of Northern New York, from the helplessness of my stuck feet, and I see One who neither slumbers, nor sleeps. No. He keeps.

And so I will be kept.

I will lift up my eyes to the mountains;
From where shall my help come?
My help comes from the LORD,
Who made heaven and earth.
He will not allow your foot to slip;
He who keeps you will not slumber.
Behold, He who keeps Israel
Will neither slumber nor sleep.
The LORD is your keeper;
The LORD is your shade on your right hand.
The sun will not smite you by day,
Nor the moon by night.
The LORD will protect you from all evil;
He will keep your soul.
The LORD will guard your going out and your coming in
From this time forth and forever.

October 2008

We're driving into New York, crossing borders like kids and cracks in the sidewalks. Careful, mindful. Each state borderline takes us further from the people with whom we built a family for a few years. We know we are leaving the south behind because there haven't been sixty foot crosses glaring at us from the highway sides in hours and the gas prices keep climbing. We know we're leaving the south behind because the temperature is cooling, or maybe it's just that the sun has gone down and our hearts too.

It's always hard to leave. It's always hard to come back. It isn't here or there, though, I am realizing. It's everywhere.

We blitzed our old town hitting every hot spot for drive through hugs and hurried How-Are-Yous? In the car I said to him that I don't why it's taken so long for me to realize that homesickness isn't a malady with a cure except heaven.

We're meant to be homesick.

He laughed from his seat and reminded me that he's been telling me that for three years. What can I say, I'm a dunce sometimes. And this is one lesson that could only be taught by moving back to the place I previously thought couldn't be topped.

Nowhere is home. Even if it feels like it on weekends.

And it used to be that because I always felt homesick, I never felt at home, but I think I'm realizing (again) that home is just the place where I feel things the deepest. And I can do that anywhere. So there, in Potsdam, New York, where I am driving toward: it's home because there I am taught and pushed and drawn out and used and sucked dry and filled up again.

But there, in Cleveland, Tennessee, with the Makeshift Family: it's home because there I love and laugh and encourage and question and am funny and get enough physical affection to fill my love tank for months. And wherever else I'll find myself in life, I'll find things that hurt and are hard, and things that are lovely and memorable. And I'll experience things that will notch my belt of spiritual lessons and things that I'll never know why I have to experience them at all.

(In my head, this is where I am home. I don't know where this is.
But it is home. Or heaven. Either one.)

But wherever I am, I'll always know lack. I'll know want. I'll know the goodness of God, but not His completeness. I'll be homesick, but my homesickness is for heaven, not for earth or New York or mountains or my church or my Makeshift Family or my real one or Starbucks or my favorite used bookstores.

My homesickness isn't wrong and I wish I had figured that out a lot sooner than now.

It's my prod to look heavenward.

September 2008

Qualifying was in the air tonight.

We live in art. It is in the paint chips on the table, passionate discussions about color and opinions about everything. Art sleeps in the baby grand in the living room, and it is where we do our living, at night, with candles and one another. Paintings hang on the walls, treasures from church rummage sales, attics, and beginning painting classes.

We make art with our words, weaving wit through our dinner conversation and morning passings.

Art swims in our heads and leaves the tangible expression somehow void of the original intention.

(Buy this print here!)

Tonight art gathers around the piano and shows off its qualified talents. She hasn't sung that since high school, he hasn't played that since his last recital, she's losing her touch, she has a cold, I only play by ear, he missed a measure, can we go back and try that again. To get it perfect.

Or at least acceptable.

To our ears. To our eyes. To our limited understanding of the original intention.
We qualify our art in this house--because we are harsh judges of the final outcome, often forgetting that excellence falls behind the scenes. Forgetting that invention is for the consumers, not the creators.

I tell my writing students tonight that I do not expect perfection, or even almost so. I expect that we work, and here I ask if one can recite a passage about it. He volunteers and I like the version he's memorized: "Whatever you do, do it heartily, as unto the Lord." Here I say that I desire excellence in motivation, in practical application, and in expectation.

I desire no qualifying art. We create with Him in mind, not us, not practice, not performance.

Him.

He did that for us.

October 2007

This morning we put ourselves in their shoes: those Jewish made for wandering shoes. We thought for a few moments about what it was like to stand there and listen to a man say He was God, say He was the answer, the Bread of Life. We tried to understand their grumbling over confusion, and how very right confusion feels in the moments we feel it.

We are guilty of the same. At least I am.

I am very good at seeing through a glass dimly--barely seeing, and yet thinking I see all. It's my nature, isn't it? To think that today's knowledge is the whole of it? To think that by today, certainly I've arrived. Haven't I? Haven't I worked up to this point? Haven't I made myself worthy of knowing what I need to know about me, my life, and maybe yours too?

Tonight I am reading Romans and Paul says this: "[Even though these things seem impossible or unbelievable] it's not as though the word of God has failed!"

Because here's the first clue that I haven't got it all: my all is still so much only a part of it all.

Paul knew that these silly Romans, and all the silly future Romans, were very caught up in jots and tittles, rights and wrongs, befores, hows, and nows. In short, they were caught up in understanding it all. But Paul also knew that the greatest mystery and gift of the gospel was that it is unfathomable--it cannot be understood. And this is not cause to think that it has somehow failed, that He has somehow failed, or that the Word has somehow failed.

But this is cause for us to say, like Peter, "To Whom else should we go?"

Because all the world has to offer is answers, analysis, protocol, and medication. It offers pat answers and dictionary definitions. It offers talk shows and best-sellers, book clubs and diets. It shouts from billboards and magazines "We have the answer! Try us!"

But we are not satisfied with answers, because there are always more questions: we are satisfied with mystery.

Because He has the words of Eternal Life.
And that is enough for this life.

May 2008

We walked long today, past the maple trees and the home of the organic co-op manager, past the big green barn and little old men mowing their lawns. We did much, pulling the small weeds and chopping the lettuce, furrowing brows over scrabble tiles and shaking the dust out of rugs. We wore the internal on the external and we were so happy all day.

Talking about dynamics and correction, the Holy Spirit and where to plant the raspberry bushes. We are happy to be. There is angst and worry and joy and contentment, and, like she said, we see the cleaned-up side of one another--but that's not all.

Because last night I sat Indian style on my bedroom floor while she knelt like a child on my bed and scolded and encouraged me to tears. I folded cardigans, boxing them for an upcoming move, and unfolded my fears about so many things. The truth is that the cleaned-up side that we see, that we show, is actually the abundance of the heart--whether it feels like it or not.

The truth is that she asked me what to pray for and I replied "Just to trust" and she answered that I already have that. Not because I do, but because in her heart she thinks I do. And, really, to have someone think that about me is all I need sometimes.

So this afternoon while I am at the piano, she walks into the room, and says "You really are very good, but here's something you can do to make it better." And I trust her, she's Albany Symphony Orchestra alumnae. And tonight when I declare "I Will Write," and imply "if it's the last thing I do" she stands in the doorway and says, "You know what I wish you would write more of? Descriptive things, show me something beside your inner workings." And the best part is that no matter how many, many times I fail or come short, she always sees past what is for what can be.

Like He does.

Just to know that someone sees my messy practicing side and still thinks the best of it. That, like a friend said once to me, regardless of the erosion that feels like is taking place throughout my being, people still see calm and consistent and worship and love that is taking place within my heart. That even when I can't see past today's portion, which is almost laughable in its predicament, His word doesn't fail.

And nothing can improve that.

(This is my Mama-Nan and me. And a hoe.
And she will hate me that she's wearing overalls in this photo.
She's usually very classy. And very believey [sic] in me and Jesus.)

May 2008

"Write for your own time, if not for your own generation exclusively. You can't write for 'posterity"--it doesn't exist. You can't write for a departed world. You may be addressing, unconsciously, an audience that doesn't exist; you may be trying to please someone who won't be pleased, and who isn't worth pleasing."
Joyce Carol Oates

(Design Sponge)

Write your heart out. Wring it out and leave it to dry, hanging over the railing like underclothes, delicate and washed by hand.

My heart doesn't wring out so well, I find that more often recently. Conversations are hard and feel forced, opening up another's heart is just as difficult--it's hard to be transparent with someone who's not. A lesson I should know.

The truth is that there is so much to say, to write about, but I don't even know where to start. The things that used to pulse through me at the speed of children on bicycles, slowly, methodically, suddenly, haphazardly, now pulse through me barely.

My blood pressure is low, my heart-rate is low, they always have been. Finding a radial pulse is met with frustration--I should be dead, more than one nurse has told me. But it's there, if you press hard enough and in the right places, it's there. If you feel and wait, you'll find that evidence that I am alive and that lifeblood curses through me.

I am alive.

With a weak pulse.

That is how I feel. Honestly. I spent a few hours on the road today, running errands, picking up, dropping off, getting pulled out of a snowy field by a good Samaritan in a blue fuel truck, I had plenty of time to think, reflect, to write in my head what I would write tonight--but I didn't. I just set my thoughts over that weak pulse and reminded myself that it is there, whether I feel it or not. The first attempt or the third. I am alive inside.

So writing my heart out will seem cold in the next few days, lifeless, but we warm our toes by the fire before feeling comes back, so suddenly hot that we jump back, afraid that we've burned ourselves.

But really, it's just that startling realization that there is feeling. That our toes weren't dead, only very, very cold.

February 2008

We catch ourselves in motion, stopped by the light, or by the lack of it. Strange how catastrophes unite. Strange how they divide as soon as we realize there are sides to take and be taken by.

This small thing, this power outage in our town is no catastrophe, but it might as well be. I'm grateful for my simple lifestyle suddenly, by the presence of candles that smell of apple cider, cranberries, or a cheap waxy substance. Our home is lit with an orange glow. I wish it could be like this all the time. Surely candles are cheaper than electric bills?

'We're all socialists already' I read in an article recently. Someone spouting off about how if we can dial 911 and share a water main with our neighbor than in some way we're already biting off the socialist sandwich and why not bite more? I haven't thought that one through yet. I'd rather not because I like having water and the knowledge that should I need it, emergency care is three numbers away. But mostly I haven't thought through it because I tend toward all or nothing in my convictions and there are only so many fine lines I can walk these days.

"This is My body, take eat. Sip of this, you who will doubt Me, you who will deny Me in three sentences, you who are denying Me already with your silver coins rattling against your robe. You think Me a fool? You think that you all walk away from this experience unchanged by one another and Me? You think that that these years are compartmentalized into tidy chapters and smooth transitions?

I'm here to tell you that if you Take Eat that you share in My sufferings every day from here on out. There is no shoulder you brush against in a crowd who will not be touched by Me by some degree, no person whose calamity you will not take on, no cup of cold water that will not be offered in My name. We're all socialists now. So take eat. This is My body. This is My blood."

When I think of that Jesus, the one who said in this life you will have sorrows, things like power outages and starving children and brothers sent off to war and friends who cry often, these things that unite us, only unite us because He drank the cup first.

(the naked pastor)

We, all of us, we're just poseurs. Thinking that our suffering unites us, thinking that our agony victimizes us, sure that our poverty deems us worthy of recompense. We're all catastrophes and this is what unites us. A conglomeration of sinners, socialists because we think there is no other way than to depend on one another for our bread and supply.

And He still says: Take Eat, this is My body. Take in my sufferings and because I'm the Only One who can deliver you from yours.

September 2009

Like a child poised for surprises only whispered about in hallways and behind closed doors, I wait. There's nothing but the whispers and quickly hushed conversations at my presence to let me know that the surprise is for me. I don't know what it is and I haven't even a clue. My only action is to wait.

Feeling strongly like inaction.

When I moved home from Tennessee I won't deny the feeling of expectation brimming about my edges. My toes, it felt like, were inching over the start line waiting for the pistol shot reckoning go! I was a caged pigeon with a message for the world, or at least Potsdam. I was something waiting to happen.

This week marks the six month anniversary of graduation into the real world. I only know that because my loan repayments start in two days--a looming bill that feels like the ribbon holding me back from crossing that starting line. I have celebrated the six month anniversary of many things, but this is not one of them.

In this town it's hard to not be surrounded by college students, they're everywhere. In every direction I see students studying, meeting, greeting, thriving, scheduling, pursuing--and all I wish for is to be back there.

Back there it felt safe and sure. A certain goal was worked toward and certain parameters were laid and met. Here it feels like decisions have to be ascertained and solidified and felt every single day. Every single day I have to re-question whether I am doing what it right and good and true for today. Here there is no solid goal being worked toward, there is only great space in front of me.

(lovely little things)

I don't like that feeling.

Because it feels very unsafe and I don't like unsafe. It feels very precarious and I don't like precarious. It feels very aimless and I hate aimless.

I'm struggling to find footing here, to be honest. I do my job, I do it well, I enjoy my work, I enjoy my church, I enjoy my family, I enjoy my plot of soil to till, but I want to see fruit--I want to know what I'm working for. I want to know that my labor isn't in vain, it isn't just bulletin boards and hours on the phone with customer service and teaching grammar and paying bills. I want to know that there's an end to this. That there's settling down and still running the race.

I want to really know that between 12 and 30 we don't see Jesus because he was sweeping sawdust and getting splinters. I want to know that 30 is coming soon.

February 2008

One of my favorite people and I sat on a favorite Potsdam ledge tonight and ended our evening with prayer. Knowing that death and life are in the power of the tongue, we tried to breath life into the body's strongest and deadliest and loveliest muscle. I won't wax eloquent too much about the tongue, it's a revolting appendage if you ask me, but tonight's post will be about the power of that speech mechanism.

On the way home I listened to unfamiliar music set to an old old song. When I was young I knew it as The Prayer of St. Patrick, I'm not sure what the young people are calling it these days:

God in my living
There in my breathing
God in my waking
God in my sleeping
God in my resting
There in my working
God in my thinking
God in my speaking.

Mmmm.

A friend made a pact with me this week: Tease Free Week for Lore. No teasing because she's so teasable, no teasing because it doesn't breed good conversation, but mostly no teasing because of this wisdom from Proverbs 26: Like a madman who throws firebrands, arrows, and death, so is the man who deceives his neighbor, and says, "Was I not just joking?"

I'm not going to lie, I pride myself on my ability to take it in and dish it out. I'm not sure whether I'm more often laughing at myself or others. I like to laugh and I like that I'm easily amused and, evidently, am the source for much amusement to others. But here are my recent thoughts--all culminating in tonight's post:

(fffound)

The tongue is flesh, quite possibly the most fleshly part of our persons, perhaps competing with only the heart--but it is still under the will of our character. If we're speaking out of the abundance of our hearts, and the old adage about there being a little bit of truth to every tease, then friends, I'm sorry to say, my heart has desperately wicked intentions.

The only answer is to get the Word so fully in my heart that there is no room for other things. I can't make my tongue get saved, it doesn't walk through the sanctification process like our emotions and character do, it's flesh and to flesh it will return. It never reaches the pinnacle and the point when it no longer needs a daily dose of Spirit. It's one of the things, my dear friends, that will continue the forging process until that longest sleep keeps it still.

One of my favorite portions of the Bible is chapter six of Isaiah--the visual image of the two angels whose sole occupation is to proclaim 'Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God almighty. The whole earth is filled with HIS glory!' Something about that, folks, gets me super excited about Heaven, where the only words I'll ever say will be filled with worship and honor.

But for now, here, in this place, on that ledge and at this dining room table, tomorrow morning, drinking coffee while the house wakes up groggily, when I am teased and when I learn to keep my mouth shut, the test is to practice for eternity.

That's my pact with you.

September 2007

I have them stashed in a dresser drawer, sitting on my backseat, slipped into a visor organizer, cataloged on my ipod. My world is wrought with albums not of the shrink-wrapped, shiny artworked, and $16.99 kind.

Playlists, mix cds, or, as we called them when I was but a wee lass, mix tapes.

For every season of our lives we hold a soundtrack, perhaps Radiohead on repeat or No Doubt on loud. Dixie Chicks with our favorite chicks and Our Song for our first date. The strains are heard and we are tumbled back into fun and tumultuous and difficult and fear and oh sweet memories.

I have a stack of mix albums, "Music for Chicas in Guatemala," "Good Songs," "My Favs for My Fav," "Road-Tripping I, II," "TN Mix," "Remember, Remember Too, Remember Again,"and more--mementos of times and friends and relationships. Some tell stories with the music, some make it up as they move along, some walk me through my life like a wax museum--strange likenesses of a life that really was and now just isn't.

Each one breaks off a piece of the artist, the real artist--the one who coupled these songs together, Latin near Jazz, followed by Folk and Instrumental, finished with Worship and Soul--gives himself when he makes a mix album. It's not just favorite tunes, it's a part of us, pieced together in our apartness by music.

So when I leave one stage of my life and head to another, and a friend slips a CD into my pocket, my luggage, my hand, I hold to it tightly. It is the soundtrack, sometimes the only way I know that I lived, really lived and laughed and loved and then left a place I called home.

They are a timeline of my life.

February 2008

I whispered a silent prayer and then one more while he stood a few feet from the machine.

Already he'd slipped two dollar bills into the slot and maneuvered that miniature crane for the allotted 20 seconds per half-dollar, and already the illusive blue teddy bear had slipped through his grasp four times.

We were on the last dollar now and the last 20 seconds. His eyes followed the motion of the mechanic luck-of-the-draw and I shut my mine--and prayed. Perhaps it was silly, but blue teddy bears mean a lot to just turned seven year old little boys and blessing him was worth a silly prayer.

She slipped then, head over heels, down the chute and from our sight. His eyes opened wide and his face suddenly buried in my coat, small arms around my waist.

"We got it!" he said.

"I know." I replied.

"This is the best birthday ever" he said.

It's funny how the best we've ever experienced yet is the best ever now, but I didn't say that.

All I said was "Thank you, Jesus." Not because the bear was so important, but because the prayer was. It wasn't silly, no matter what you think. I needed that bear. He wanted that bear, but I needed it.

I needed to know again that prayer works for the small things. That He hears me, that He listens to me, that He answers me, that I matter, and that small boys and blue bears matter.

Her name is Blueberry, "Do you like that name? Cause she's yours too, yours and mine."

I like that name fine.

Happy Seventh Birthday, Benjamin. It was the best birthday ever for me too.

(daisy cat)

February 2008

From an email I sent recently:

And if contentment is all I need, and is all He's doing, than I hope He answers my daily prayer soon. I wonder how one can want contentment as badly as I do and still find it ever illusive.

As I was driving home tonight I list the things that make me feel content: a daily, normal schedule, daily exercise, rising early, lots of writing, lots of color and indoor plants, gardening, my own house--or space bigger and more permanent than my current lot--and I think that these things can't be the catalysts for my contentment. They can't be! They're far too selfish, far too worldly, far too here.

But then I remember my favorite Richard Wilbur poem, Love Calls Us to the Things of This World--and I think of laundry and housekeeping and bread-winning and daily schedules and gardens, and I realize that though we're not to love the things of this world, we're called to love and Love put us here on earth with a Garden to tend--the least I can do is tend my plot well. Even if it is just dirt.

This is my lesson daily. To tend my plot, to live by that punctual rape of every blessed day. To watch the hour hand rise and fall and rise again, its only hope a paycheck and a kept-to schedule. I'm learning about sweeping sawdust and waiting for 30, for release and a sense of what is to come.

Right now it's to be faithful with the little things, to weed that plot and keep dirt beneath my fingernails--proof that this life isn't clean and orderly and understood, but it is real and created and that I am a part of it.

Right now Love calls me to not know the end of the story, but to hang my heart, like laundry on lines, on the hope that certainty is the hour hand and the end. And that punctual rise and fall and rise again will yield another sort of hope that doesn't disappoint or be crowded out by weeds and failed seeds.

Now they are flying in place, conveying
The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving
And staying like white water; and now of a sudden
They swoon down into so rapt a quiet
That nobody seems to be there.
The soul shrinks

From all that is about to remember,
From the punctual rape of every blessed day,
And cries,
"Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam
And clear dances done in the sight of heaven."

(Bloom)

February 2008

A leaf fell from the maple tree in front of us. The raspberries are giving their last and homegrown lettuce is on sale at the farm stand. It's the time of the year when all the fresh presence that Spring brought has left and is leaving. It's the time of the year when we pull out the clothes we tire of so much more quickly than linens and light cottons.

(Photo by Whisk Kid)

We say goodbye to mornings on the porch and hello to the kitchen woodstove. The couple across the street had their last words and we sat on the front step and watched her throw suitcases and shoes into the back of her father's car.

I'm not ready for winter this year. I rarely am, and perhaps it's the two year absence from this tundra that makes me less ready for the coming hibernation. All I know is that this favorite season is too quickly over and settling in for tea and wool sounds dreadful. I like green and outside and breezes. I like fresh and I like new. I even like a little old. But I hate dead.

But, which is more, I hate the deadness of unmet expectations and delayed hope. I am, I'm told, too often a direct reflection of my immediate circumstances instead of representation of the Christ I long to emulate. I memorized the first few verses of Romans 5 as a weapon against this great dread of mine. I like how The Message puts it:

There's more to come: We continue to shout our praise even when we're hemmed in with troubles, because we know how troubles can develop passionate patience in us, and how that patience in turn forges the tempered steel of virtue, keeping us alert for whatever God will do next. In alert expectancy such as this, we're never left feeling shortchanged. Quite the contrary--we can't round up enough containers to hold everything God generously pours into our lives through the Holy Spirit.

So this is what I think about today, as I shelve art supplies for the coming school year, as I eat celebratory autumn pumpkin muffins, as I don a sweater and hunt for a space heater to use at work, I think that all these reminders of the end of Summer, the end of newness, create a gap that can only be filled by Spring.

And, in the meantime, we don't feel shortchanged because we know that it's coming.

September 2007

I’m not sure why, like the wardrobe or pools of water in Lewis’s Narnia, the archway at Hale Cemetery takes you into a whole different world. But today, in the perfect blueness above and trees kissed by the sunlight into colorful frenzies, we crossed under that archway and entered a place of quiet. A whole different world, it seemed.

I’m speaking about a different sort of peace altogether. Perhaps it’s because my morning was surrounded with people and demands and serving and more people (All of which I love. I really, really do love.), but this afternoon’s peace was that much more noticed because of it, I’m sure.

Here in this local cemetery, surrounded by autumn and carpeted in pine-cones and maple leaves, the stuff of seasonal death—there’s a stillness too; a sort of nonchalant nod in the general direction of life and all its demands and needs. Fall comes and with it there is a letting go, a rest from all the warm-weather needs—sunlight, water, tender soil—trees release their summer beauty, grass hunches over in preparation for its coming blanket. We all hold up the snowy white flag of surrender to this certain end.

My pastor mentioned this morning that we don’t see U-Hauls being pulled by hearses at funerals. Good thought. Truth. Death means the end of it all. End of demands and needs and requirements and serving. It means turning down, shutting up, covering over, and sleeping at last. A sort of letting go that feels like the peace found in Hale Cemetery.

As we left she quoted I Corinthians 15 to me. And I was reminded that all this stillness and peace, the ending of life and all of its demands and joys and pains and thrills, are still cheap substitutes for the real triumph for which we’re still waiting.

September 2007

A dictionary of garden lessons today:

"I've been planting seeds," she said, "and not just of the garden variety." She pulled weeds from around roots as I sat on the perimeter and let tears rolls down my face, swiping them away with every statement of truth spoken. I am unabashed and free with my tears around her.

"Sometimes the roots go down really deep and you have to dig around, eventually just breaking them off sometimes so they can be transplanted." I nodded, knowing as well as she did that she wasn't talking about Late Blooming Raspberry Bushes.

Her knees are covered in dirt and there's a spot on her face. She swats at gnats intermittently and I continue to cry, and listen.

I ask hard questions like "Did you ever resent the call of God on your life? Want to settle for less, find yourself settling for less to evade the call?" She gives hard answers like "It's only time to plant the peas and a few other things now, we'll wait a bit to plant the rest."

Because we have to do things in order.

I repent for my unfaithfulness and discontentment. She leans back and says that a mother's heart always loves and always forgives, and always knows that the monster lurking on the surface isn't the real person inside. I turn my face and cry more, looking at the flat patch of dark earth beside me, knowing we see the seeds but only because we know they're there. To any other eye, though, it's a dark patch of earth.

We choose an apple tree and a cherry one, get a short lesson in small orchard care and drive toward home, the branches of our new purchases brushing our shoulders in the front seat.

"We're not planting this for us, you know," she said. "We don't plant fruit trees so that we get the fruit. You understand that right?" We are at the top of the hill, staring at the small plot we both call home. My eyes are on the small orchard to the left of the house, five fruit trees from a hundred years ago. They are old and gnarled, we love them for their shade and small tart apples in the fall.

She doesn't say it, but we both understand it: the fruit that we bear isn't for us; we're the tree, others are the recipients of our fruit.

She is leaving for an appointment and I sit inside the perimeter of the garden, pulling out a few more weeds, not necessarily of the garden variety, and pushing Early Blooming Raspberry Plants into the soft black earth. I am not so good at this gardening thing, this planting and waiting and knowing that I may never see taste and see, but I know how to tend. I know how to listen. And I know how to learn.

And I know a lesson when I hear one.

This year's garden at home. Awfully purty, eh?

May 2008