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Pieces of Poppy and Alaska is on the Island Tonight

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Sometimes it’s hard for a mama to let go of seasons that once were.

Sometimes it’s real hard.

When the kids were little…one long season of pregnant, nursing, diapers, noses, and teaching them how to read. Love Jesus. Be nice to one another.

Then one day, a house full of people taller than you, louder than you, funnier…and you’ll cry because somewhere, somehow when they were sleeping, seasons changed.

And you’re sad.

Hang on. Learn how to embrace the new season. How to enjoy the changes.

My friend reminds me in winter…if I don’t enjoy the snow, the season will be long and miserable. And the snow will still be there.

So I enjoy the snow. The loud. The chaos.

Then, the leaving.

So impossible, this leaving. Seemed so far off so long ago. Here we are now though, them leaving, whether literally or one foot out the door with the second foot soon to follow, that boot hovered there, right over the threshold and isn’t that just what we raised them to do?

So proud and each day I’m older and they are too, growing into the lives I’ll one day no longer be part of. They’ll quietly say goodbye and remember.

Season changes are so hard.

And the older they get, the older I get, the harder the season changes get.

My mama coming to live with us changed our season.

I went from raising to caretaking in a breath and without being able yet to catch that breath, she left us.

There have been a lot of seasons in this season. It’s a hard reset to go from orchestrating to observing.

I miss my husband. We are getting to know one another in this new season. We’ve never been in this season before.

I miss my brother. We are getting to know one another in this new season. We’ve never been in this season before.

And why is it that sometimes when you’re just getting used to one season, the season changes and now you have to get used to a whole other season and Jesus tells us to have our lamps lit and always be ready, but when you’re a woman who never feels ready, how do you keep your light bright and ready yourself for a change of the seasons you didn’t know was coming?

How do I be strong and be ready?

I am strong but my mama left before I was ready and now I’m here in this place we loved so much, her loving it because I did and she loved being with me, so it became our place together.

Our favorite winter hobby, scrolling all the beautiful places to stay, making a plan, all the things we wanted to do, keeping our little list of fun little adventures and then going on out and doing them in the warmth, the sun, her holding onto the arm of one of her strong grandchildren or her son-in-law, loving them, loved ones who loved her because she was mine, her feeling like a princess in her little princess suite that overlooked mountains and oceans where she could hear birds sing her awake each morning and us welcoming her day with coffee.

I brought her here with me this one last time, her ashes in my pocket, and I didn’t know that even after saying goodbye this spring and summer, I’d be spending the rest of the winter and the rest of my life saying goodbye.

I wasn’t ready.

I wasn’t ready to go from being caretaker-of-children to caretaker-of-my-mama to being alone on this earth without her, and without them too in a sense, and now every first thing without my mama is a first thing because isn’t our mama with us for all the days we remember all our lives, and every first thing without them is a first because how do we change from having them in every season to letting them go more and more in every season?

My Ella and I —my kids, so much like me but so much like their daddy, strong and stoic they all are—she’s home with me still and we opened up the box that has been sitting on the bar in my kitchen since April, that pretty blue velvet all tied up with two little extra black bags, one for that panic button I made her wear around her neck, and in the other her mechanical heart valve I asked the funeral home to save for me after she was cremated. She was so proud of that heart valve, it saved her life after all, and I am a homeschool mama after all. She would love that we have it.

We’ve kept her on the bar near to us. Part of us. Right in the middle where she liked to be.

We know she’s free, where she always and only wanted to be…Mom, now that you live here with us, we should talk about where you’d like to go eventually when you die. I know that’s a hard decision since you’re not from here and hopefully this will be something we can work out over many years...we talked about it shortly after she got sick and moved here and I became her person, not just via phone but her person in person now.

There was a long pause then. Me, thinking she was trying to find her words like she often had to do…remembering the tricks from the speech therapist her and I found after the word dementia came into our vocabulary. How to not stutter.

She didn’t stutter. Or giggle and shrug like she usually did when calling upon the tricks from her eight weeks in therapy to find the right word her brain was telling her to say.

Well honey. I want to go to Heaven.

How many times have I thought of her there since she left us so peacefully that spring morning?

Whole. Happy. Without pain. No uncertainty about what is ahead.

At peace and full of joy.

And what we have left here of her are earthly remains: quilts and clothes and her precious cabin…memories and her ashes.

My daughter and I, that quiet one, we scooped out six little packages of white powder…what a weird thing to do on a Friday night, Mom, she says.

I knew you wouldn’t flinch doing this with me I tell her.

And then we’re done, very businesslike and sciencey, much like when we work together on a hard farm task, finished now and there are six little urns, one with a missing tassel so I take that one for the trip, the least prettiest to travel so the grandkids can all have the prettiest ones.

I have one to pack and then I think I better check the rules and make sure I’m not breaking any laws —airport, island, or spiritual—because to me, it just seems like the most normal thing in the world to take pieces of Poppy and sprinkle little bits of her in all her favorite sunny places, those precious few spots where she had big little adventures with her family on this island she loved so much.

There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens:
a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot,
a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to tear down and a time to build,
a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance,
a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them, a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
a time to search and a time to give up, a time to keep and a time to throw away,
a time to tear and a time to mend, a time to be silent and a time to speak,
a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace. (Ecclesiastes 3)

I didn’t know in bringing this part of her here I would be saying goodbye in a way I hadn’t yet.

I didn’t know we’d be turning into a new season.

Every day I miss her, but in leaving bits of her here, it is a saying goodbye that hasn’t happened yet.

And as I travel with my grown kids, I realize they will one day say goodbye to me and maybe tears will roll quietly down their faces too when they leave pieces of me behind.

The seasons will change for them too.

Matt keeps my little urn in the cup holder of our rented Jeep, and just in case TSA had any questions as to why I had a small container of white powdery substance in my luggage, I emptied our little supply of ashes into a Ziploc and threw in a copy of her death certificate so they’d know I’m not a drug smuggler and that I was just carrying my mama with me through the airport and across the ocean and hopefully they wouldn’t have too many questions because I really didn’t know what would happen on the other end of the journey.

But what is happening is pretty beautiful and precious.

A time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance.

We’ve spent time as a family getting to know one another in new ways, but in old ways too.

And when we went to our favorite beach I put her little defaulted-tassel urn in my beach bag and over the course of the evening amongst the swimming and the sand digging and the picnic dinner and the laughter, we all took a quiet little time with the urn, me making sure each of us had our own space and time to say goodbye in our own quiet way, and we all left some of her on her favorite stretch of tropical coastline, putting her deep down in the sand where she liked to plant her toes.

We have a list. All her favorite places and stops here on the island, and while disposing of ashes in the ocean requires special permits, and planting them in gardens or cemeteries requires other paperwork, sprinkling little portions here and there is safe and sterile and legal, and I love the feeling of little bits of her ash on my fingers and if I imagine enough, my hands might smell like her favorite strong perfume we all loved to hate and that she’d spray on the letters and cards she’d mail to us in our faraway place Alaska before she joined us in the north land.

We’ve visited her favorite beach thrice now, and her favorite little walking trail once. My brother and I —Matt, so kind, leaving it to me to grieve how I need to, and while he makes sure my tiny urn is always there in the Jeep, he is gentle and leaves it to me and my brother to do with the ashes as we wish—he and I folded a little ash-batch up in the only container we had in the rental, not wanting to carry her ceramic urn in my pocket, a paper bag carrying croissants from the morning stop at the favorite bakery shop on the way through town. I shook enough in for my brother and I to get some good pinches out and I folded the makeshift paper envelope up, complete with coconut crumbs, tidily and tight like a joint, laughing as I used the skills I learned from my high school boyfriend who taught me how to roll and smoke a joint. My mom would’ve gotten a good laugh out of that. We laughed at the crazy, redneck parts of life because never is it perfect or uniform, is it? And she knew that rolling with us, things would always be a little weird and unorthodox, but that it somehow always worked out perfectly, and most always, beautifully even.

Like that time we were here on girls’ trip and had to check out that morning but had a long day before our flight out, so we drove around the island to see all the sights, landing on a beach close to the airport that evening. learning soon that was mostly a spot for locals and the homeless, as she and I navigated around bushes strewn with little piles of toilet paper while my girls strolled up the beach out of sight. It was getting dark and I made friends with the homeless folks in the public restrooms, them happy and grilling their dinners on hotplates, getting dark and raining, but she thought we were having the most glamourous last day of vacation ever, oblivious to my mama-worries as my girls finally strolled back up the beach and I breathed a sigh of relief and she whipped out her iPhone to take some beach photos of her two precious and beautiful granddaughters.

Oh, she loved them.

The apple of her eye those.

All of us this week, on the walkway up to that beautiful spot she and I walked twice, I cried a bit because she and I would be the tail end of that walking throng, all us tourists, her moving slowly, me alongside, wishing I could walk faster and keep up with the group, but knowing my mama needed me, and isn’t that kind of how the change of seasons goes? This slowing down?

I wasn’t ready to go so slow, again after she’d gone, but now, here I am, going slow once more, and she’s not walking beside me, in my brother’s pocket now, rolled up tight like a sloppy joint, and he and I get separated and I find myself walking alongside a nice grandma who lives here but has her whole family visiting from California, all her gown children, and she’s had to slow down because she’s tired and the little 200 yard walk is long like it was for my mama, and I love this grandma and then somehow she’s hugging me and I’m hugging her and in ten minutes I’ve learned all about her housekeeping job at a hotel here on the island and all about her family and her faith in Jesus, and in that short time she’s somehow become my mom and my grandma and my kids’ Poppy and she loves me too because I’m from Alaska and because I have kids grown and because I slowed down and walked with her.

To everything there is a season, and sometimes the seasons are fast, but sometimes when we just slow down we learn to love the snow so we can embrace the season and learn along the way and experience joy while we go.

These are all slow things for me to process, but my husband, that astute and brief one, he tells me when I worry about things that aren’t mine to worry about: those aren’t your squirrels; those aren’t your nuts.

I am learning in this changing of seasons, what is my job and what isn’t my job.

What are my squirrels; what are my nuts?

It is no longer my job to make sure my children are kind to one another. They are, mostly, but it is no longer my job to oversee.

It is not my job to make sure everyone is happy. When they bring new people into our family, I will welcome them and love them and make them feel comfortable with open arms, but it isn’t my job to make them love me or mine. It isn’t my nut to cement them into the fold.

What is my job is to make sure my husband is loved.

To spend time with Jesus.

To grow in my faith.

To navigate the next season, whatever it will bring.

To try to be ready.

To keep my lamp lit.

So much joy on this trip. Laughter. Togetherness.

We trailed behind on the way back, my brother and I, and he brought out of his pocket the little joint-wrapped package I’d given him on the way up, and we were sneaky because somehow it didn’t feel official like it does on the movies and sometimes when you are Gen-X and do things in redneck you assume you’re breaking some kind of law, even if it’s just the law-of-the-norm, and I took a pinch between my fingers and left pieces of Poppy trailing behind me on the little trail she loved to trudge slowly with me at her side.

The overgrowth of vines, huge banana leaves, tiki torches we spent so much time taking pictures of her and I, red spiky flowers I still need to learn the name of…I left a dusting of her there and the tears rolled down my face on the boat ride back because I will never come here with her again.

But I am here with my family now. And she would absolutely delight in that.

Leaving pieces of her earthly tent here is for us.

And she so would have loved that doing so is part of this trip. That we did it over her birthday week. That we came to her favorite place.

That we are together.

She would’ve loved the outdoor luau show with the fire, and tomorrow we go to the restaurant we took her to the first time we were here, that place during Covid that had an indoor luau, and she’d never had a Mai Tai before and that night she had two, loving the pineapple wedges and chewing on them with joy, their freshness.

We have a few more places to leave pieces of Poppy…I’m not sure if we’ll roll her up like a joint or if they’ll be short trips where I can pop her urn in the pocket of my dress or put it in the beach bag like I did the other night, but we’ll make sure all of her favorite places have a little bit of her in the soil.

The canyon…the places we’ve stayed…the cave we held hands in and walked the depths of the earth…

She’s not here and I know that.

There is no power in her ashes other than the emotional power they hold for being her physical remains in our care here on this earth.

My mama the person is with her King in Glory and she’s been there since she stepped out of her earthly tent and stood before Him to be welcomed into the rest of her life, eternity.

And if there is a window from Heaven —a veil where they get to see the good things here on earth—I see her smiling through it.

Having us all here. Sneaking her in.

Oh, she’d laugh at that. How we carried her around with us. Matt saying perfectly natural as we step out of the Jeep…you have your Mama, honey?

She would dig this mission. So much. She’d be all over it, my co-conspirator, legal, normal, weird, or whatever.

She was all-in. Anything to do with her family, their projects, this island, their Alaska, this life…their life…her life…if she was in, she was ALL in.

I want to be all-in.

My squirrels, my nuts, if it’s mine, I want to be all-in.

When my kids have to say goodbye to me someday, I want them to laugh. I want them to sneak me in, I want them to draw together. I want them to have joy and speak Jesus and how much I loved Him and how joyful it is that I stepped up out of here right up to my knees before Him and that I hugged Him tight, tighter than I was ever able to hug them, and that I was whole.

I want them to raise a glass and know that there was nothing on this planet that I ever loved more than their father and them, except our Savior Jesus.

Cheers because she is now whole.

Completely.

So much joy on this trip. Laughter. Togetherness.

These are my squirrels. These are my nuts.

Thank you, Mama. Thank you, Poppy. Thank you, Kauai. Thank you, thank you most of all, thank you, Jesus.

A Place of Your Own

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I spent years working away at my kitchen table, steering the ship of my job and house while homeschooling my bouncy bunch of four bright-minded students, letting my laptop slip into sleep as I’d answer math questions or teach how to count out change or correct grammar on book reports, all through the late mornings after we’d read from the Bible and our current chapter book while their mouths were busy eating breakfast.

We’d curl up later after lunch with yet another stack of books, full of history and astronomy and earth science and how babies are born. The littlest of them would play with K’Nex on his reading blanket and our time would draw out as we’d learn and learn, and then they’d have a quiet time in their rooms where they’d listen to good stories and classical music on CD’s, played on their very own little portable stereo that reminded me of the boom box I used to carry around back in fourth grade. Minus the CD player, of course.

Sometimes I’d rest too, but most times I’d work some more on the laptop, or I’d write before it was time to start thinking of dinner.

We shared our days.

Every day.

I wouldn’t change those years or that time for all of the money in the world.

For twenty years my space was their space, and that was my life mission without me even realizing it. I was their lifeline and they were mine, and those years make up our family history and legacy and are the etchings of who I am and who they are.

Before them, I used to share space with a shift full of men and women in gun belts and turnout gear. I’d send them on calls where their life was in danger, or a citizen was under threat, and I’d answer routine phone traffic mixed in with a 911 here and there, and I’d keep track of where each and every one of them were, who they were with, and what the danger level was, the status of the house fire, or had the traffic stop yet cleared…all while intermittently typing up a report before I clocked out. And I’d do it all while running background checks and gun permit info and driver’s license statuses and maybe microwaving up a late lunch before the next call came in or putting on a pot of fresh coffee before the lieutenant rolled up to the station for day shift. If I had an issue in my space, I’d hit the big red button and gun belts would jangle urgently up the hall and the fire department door would fly open, and my family-of-that-season would come running to my rescue. They were my lifeline like I was theirs and those years are part of my legacy and are etchings of who I am and who they are.

Since 1993 I’ve shared space with my beloved and it’s been an upstairs apartment with slanted ceilings and floors, and then the space we yearned to buy, a single-wide trailer-house on a quarter acre on the ghetto side of a swanky lake community where we thought we’d arrived; man I loved that place…and then the wide-open space of this Alaska, this land where there’s a place and a space for all who dream to put a stake in the cold, dark ground… and that space was shared with me and with him, and all those who’ve come around us protectively in love, and they were our lifeline and I like to think, I hope to think, that in some way, we’ve been theirs too because oh, how we love them. They are part of the legacy of the two of us and they are etched on our hearts and on who we are.

Our Alaska spaces and places have been friends’ houses, our first rented house, the beaches, the tundra, the first house we ever owned —that one we busted open a bottle of champagne upon, right there on the corner of the concrete block foundation– this smaller one now that looks fancier but that had us cashing in part of our retirement fund in order to secure the land it sits on so that our children would have a countrified, free-range life…this place that maybe we’ll die on and leave to them someday…

…and then there’s Kodiak Island where he spent so much time working and I used to take the ferry over when our first two were babies and I was swollen with our third…we’d walk the beaches and oh, don’t I still have jars full of beach treasurers…and then almost twenty years later I took the kids and their friends, and that one I carried in my belly those earlier trips walked beside me as a near-on adult and it was precious…

…Denali National Park where we’ve driven our band of family and friends through four times now across that wild terrain…big field trips for our little homeschool and I’d read out loud for hours and hours while he drove us safely through the frost heaves and alien landscape…

…Captain Cook State Park where we’ve dreamed of children —and maybe even conceived one all those years ago— and it’s been the close place that seems faraway, where we can escape up the road for a few days or an afternoon, flying kites and camping and building fires and finding agates and ourselves again…

…all the many beautiful lakes, rivers, islands, inlands, glaciers, campgrounds, forests, and backroads of this land that swallowed us whole and made us her own…

…The farm our kids dragged us into…

…The place family comes to ooh and ahh over and sometimes comes back more than once or sometimes even comes to settle because we are here…

Alaska places and spaces have been our lifeline—where we found the LORD…or maybe where He found us—and it will be part of our legacy; it is etched deeply—so deeply—on our hearts and is such a big and beautiful part of who we are.

It’s funny how when you get older places become engraved on us —our memories and our hearts—and get right down into the cells of us.

Mayo Clinic where they saved my husband’s life and gave him back to me; I can hear my shoes squeaking on their immaculate floors as I walk to his room and I can feel on my palm the smooth and delicate strong grip of the heart surgeon, an angel on earth who held my husband’s heart with his two miraculous hands that day, then hours later held my two trembling hands and told me my man was strong.

My soul sister’s kitchen table polished in tears and a couple red wine stains from when we use laughter to add to the warm, worn patina of her tabletop, that meeting place that draws us all to the center of her home and her heart.

Those church chairs, stackable and mauve, chosen carefully by good stewards to hold the growing body of bodies; I always smile when I find one with a little rip that’s been carefully stitched together, and how many times have my people gathered in them, all six or eight or ten of us, singing and listening and opening our Bibles and learning and lighting candles on Christmas Eve?

That faraway island we’ve come to love, come to run to when the bones get cold and the wanderlust gets loud…that place where we celebrated a life still with us, and now many trips later, where we’ll mourn one gone from us…

All the other places that are tied up in our work, some of it decades long, and all of it swirling our family and our schedules and when we celebrate holidays and when Daddy’s off, and when Mom has to spend a day away from her home desk and be at the office desk…all this work our hands have nourished, and the livelihood he’s provided that allowed me to be right here with them all these years, feeding and teaching and being as productive as I could as I pecked away at my littler job, —the paycheck part, not the raising kids part, we both know what a high-value position I held, even as I was still learning it— this job that nourishes kids and clubs and communities while we grew ours up right along with all of the extra workload.

The electric man and the 4-H lady…these jobs have been our places for many years, and they are etched on us and our family forever, and even those will one day be part of our legacy.

I could go on and on, and I have probably…but if you’re with me still yet, where is your place?

Where have you built stories and legacies and what places are etched on your life and your history and your heart?

It used to be I wasn’t as attached to places as I am now that I’m over the crest of the hill of my life, but even as a younger woman there were a few places that molded me…my granny’s house…the beach of my childhood…the little white church where Matt and I were married…

But really, it only came about as I aged a bit that places began to etch their significance upon my heart.

And that I learned that the lesson is, that it usually isn’t even the place so much, but the people with whom you share it that makes a place so precious.

The days and the hours and the years and the minutes…the work and the love and the sweet talks and the hard discussions…the tears, the growing, the learning, the laughter…

…but mostly just the time.

Those are my favorite places.

The places where I’ve spent the time.

And in a world so rife with troubles right now, so much division, so much ugliness, so much uncertainty…don’t we all need a place?

Is that a state? A friend’s table? Your church family? A lake or a library? The four walls in which you dwell?

I hope my friend, that you have a place you love and feel loved.

Where the work of your hands and the love in your heart is safe, and honored, and something you are proud of.

Where you are someone’s lifeline like they are yours.

Where your time there becomes etched on your heart and the history of who you are.

My hope is that you have a place where your heart is heard, and that the heartbeat of your creator is felt.

He has a place for you, and I hope He is welcome and embraced in your place.

I hope you are loved, and I hope that every place you are blessed to be in touches you in ways known only to you and the LORD and your people, and that always, it is etched on your heart and becomes part of your legacy.

*

This piece is dedicated to my mama. I miss her so during this changing of the seasons, and I am so thankful for the time and the places I shared with her. They are etched forever on my heart and my history. I love you, Mommy.

Be sure you put your feet in the right place, then stand firm. Abraham Lincoln

The Lemons and Me and This Season

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I found a patch of fireweed last week that was in full fuzz, and I couldn’t believe my eyes.

How are we here so quickly?

How are we six weeks out from winter now, with the Sockeye gone and the Coho here, and with those Silvers running, the feeling of frost each morning has rushed in too, and the need for a reset each night lingers?

Oh, it’s been a year. And it’s just August.

I think every single person close to me feels the same.

It’s been a year.

It was supposed to be the year when we all finally…FINALLY threw off the bad memories of the pandemic…when we all had a fresh start…when it was just going to be a page-turner and a chapter-changer.

But man, it’s been a year.

And this time of year, this particular season, it always has me yearning for a new planner.

A fresh start.

College classes start back up, a fresh new year begins in my job, my babies crank up their schooling…

It’s a natural start to new beginnings, and some years are happy and others are reflective…

but this one…this one has been a little sad.

Oh I still want a new planner. I’ve chosen my 2026 version, I’ve got the stickers ordered, I’ve got a PLAN for the planner.

That’s just because I’m looking to rein some things in, though.

Looking for some sense in the sadness…some methodical for the melancholy.

Because the older I get, the harder it comes, this changing-of-the-seasons.

And as I take stock in the state of things here in this bottom quarter of 2025, I feel the weight of it all.

This season that has a nation divided. Once again, here we are divided, this time uglier somehow.

This season that has me facing the rest of my life without my mama by my side.

This season that has our family walking the line of being empty-nesters while still having children living at home.

This season that has our farm downsizing as the kids grow up and out of their childhoods, and the animals begin to age out and leave us.

This season that has my body saying her child-bearing years are through, and it’s time to transition into menopause.

This season that is seeing friendships change and morph and fall off or grow deeper.

This season that has me wondering what I’m going to do with the remainder of the years that I have left on this earth.

This season…

Man, this season.

They don’t tell you when the babies are young that THIS season will be the hardest one yet.

That this season will grow you, flex you, bend you, break you, form you, mold you…in ways you never knew you’d be stretched or forced into before.

This season that has graves dug and cremains sitting on the bar in a fancy box, and thyroid medication-refill calls on speed dial, and the last year of high school plans saved in .pdf format after decades of making them.

That this season will have you on the brink of divorce one moment, to clinging in the next to your spouse like he’s the last person on the planet.

Hysterical and heartbreaking.

All at once.

That’s this season.

They don’t tell you that part.

They don’t tell you that your heart will break and you will be angry on a whim and that your bullshit threshold will be so thin that you can barely deal with people anymore.

They don’t tell you that you will feel all the years of your life that have passed and that you will just sit on your porch and ponder how many decades are to come and that you’ll reconsider all of your life’s decisions while holding so fast and tightly to all the ones you’ve made because they’ve all, every one, formed you into a person you wish you’d known when you were a younger woman.

They don’t tell you that the friendships you have will be lifelines or that your spouse who’s loved you almost two-thirds of your life will be the most cherished possession you’ve ever held, or that you’ll marvel when the adults who look like you and who were delivered out of your body will all-of-a-sudden become your closest confidants and that there is no greater joy than having them all together within the same walls you’ve all worn down together with dirt and blood and hearts and handprints.

This season.

They don’t tell you that you’ll care for aging parents and that once you finally, finally get used to that shock of an adjustment, you’ll be too soon saying goodbye and finding yourself an orphan even as you sit there mature and grown and feeling like a twelve-year-old searching.

They don’t tell you that your siblings, that bloodline, that will suddenly become something precious and opposite of what was once disregarded and taken for granted because it was something you were thrown into by chance.

They don’t tell you that friends won’t always be loyal and that what you thought was solid might just be flimsy, or that we live in a time when believing differently from someone might just be the reason they write you off as not-worthy.

They don’t tell you that others may just cling to you like their old age depends upon it, and that one day you’ll realize they’re right, and you’ll cling to them too and look forward to those grey years of laughing and love, and that you’ll hold onto them like a precious jewel because that’s what they are.

They don’t tell you that your faith will change.

That your friends will change.

That your family will change.

And that through it all, you’ll still be expected to be the same.

This season.

I sit on my porch and I work and I think and I ponder it all…

and sometimes I read my Bible, and I remember the fig tree and how it withered, and I cry because I don’t want to wither.

I don’t want to be without fruit.

I don’t want Him to look at me and say I’ve just spent all this time withering and have Him cast me away.

Because I’m not.

I’m not worthless.

I’m not withering.

I’m growing.

I’m budding.

I’m trying.

I’m striving for the Son and I’m trying to grow fruit, and just like my five lemon plants, those precious babies of mine forced to grow in this cold, cold land even though they’d much prefer the warm, tropical home we hijacked them from…

I reach.

My leaves curl, and sometimes they even die and fall off.

But I keep reaching for the Son just like they keep reaching for my windows, and slowly, ever slowly…they grow, and even though it’s not always seen until the sun shines again, I think maybe I am too.

That one, oh, he’s so crooked and curled and lopsided, and isn’t that just like me in this season?

LORD, isn’t that just like me?

Trying. Reaching. I hate this season, I can’t stand this climate, I yearn for the warmer times…

I long for when they were babies and I wish for when things weren’t so politically divisive, and I crave for times when they were simpler…

But I’m gonna keep growing through.

I’m gonna keep reaching.

I’m gonna keep stretching out my limbs and praising and looking for the sun in the dark, dark seasons…

When the hormones make it miserable, or when I’m stuck between peace and the plan, or when the bureauracy of the job hits hard, or when days change so fast I have to turn on a dime, or when the weight of the way forward needs more energy than what I have to bring, or when You may have to install a grow light to help me get through the days when all I see is the darkness…

I will keep growing.

I will remember grace. And mercy. And lessons.

The family I’ve borne and all the years we’ve been given.

The husband who has loved me faithfully and would give his breath to see me happy and safe.

The people who have given their lives so that I may have freedom.

The friendships that are threads in the quilt of my life.

I will remember goodness and love.

Like my lemons, I will reach through the chill of the changing of seasons and the darkness that lingers more and more each day.

I won’t succumb to the cold or the bleak or the uncertainty of what is to come.

I will grow.

I will remember there was One who gave up everything He had so that I might live this life He gave.

I will remember that every day here is a blessing and a gift.

I will remember that not everyone knows yet the freedom I have, the salvation that’s been laid out for all to find.

I will remember.

And on the days I forget, I will cling to the hope and the reminders that are there in the everyday blessings of this life…these ones given to me, those friends and family…those words in the ancient writings that continue to etch their truths into my heart.

I will remember.

And I will grow.

Cheesecake and Dying

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I came across an old journal today as I was hunting for a new planner for the upcoming season —Autumn always makes my planner side jittery and searching for something fresh— and it took me two reads of the page to realize the scrawl I saw was my mama’s and not mine.

She’s been gone now three and a half months, but sometimes it still feels like she’s here, and when I realized the chicken scratching was her writing —done in my book from that weekend in the passenger seat where she took notes while I drove—it stopped me in my tracks for a moment because I remembered when she wrote that, and it seemed like just last week.

It was her sixty-ninth birthday, and I’d taken her away to my favorite getaway, “our” cabin in nearby Homer, the place my husband and I have taken our kids and ourselves for over twenty years of getaways.

So many breaks: celebrating mid-winter with the February birthday of our firstborn; taking an annual anniversary break in October or whenever we could squeeze it in, just me and Matt; taking family down when they came in from out of state…somehow, my mama and I had never been, just the two of us.

So that year, that year before she began her serious decline, but after she’d begun to rely upon me more by becoming an Alaskan and my neighbor, I took my mama to my favorite getaway. We splurged on a birthday dinner at the best steakhouse in Alaska, and we took in the hot tub, and we started a book that someday I may just write.

“Cheesecake Conisseurs: The Story of a Mother, a Daughter, and their Quest for the Perfect Cheesecake.”

It started at the steakhouse on Day One (Cheesecake #1) and ended at the pizza joint on Day Two (Cheesecake #2).

It sounds trivial, this cheesecake quest, but you have to understand, at this point in our relationship, my mama had had a stroke and was well on her way into full-blown dementia, me on my way into full-blown caregiving.

We just didn’t know it then…what was to come.

Because then, she was still in her apartment, just three miles from me around the corner, and driving herself to her doctor’s appointments —fully independent but no denying the fact that she’d sold her precious home four thousand miles away to relocate to be near to me where she remained on a waitlist at our nearby senior center to live out the rest of her life.

We had all come to terms with that change of seasons.

But in the cheesecake season, she was cooking, cleaning, driving herself, tracking her appointments and coming over for dinners, enjoying her visits from grandbabies, Sunday church time, outings with friends, and all her field trips for my job…giving all the help and love where she knew how to give it and fitting into the life here in her new state just like a glove.

At that point, it was just us who had to adjust. And I say that selfishly because she sure made her adjustments, too. She had sold up her precious little house in the woods that she loved so much and she said goodbye to best friends and neighbors she knew well, and she plopped herself into a state where she had to establish residency and find new doctors and a new church family…and her self-reliance took a backseat to depending on the family she knew well and loved to be part of, but who she also knew was busy and active and spinning in circles where she knew she’d have to become part of the orbit.

She was brave.

Even in her dependence upon me, upon us, she was brave.

So I tried to make her birthday special because even though our family may celebrate birthdays sporadically or when the oilfield shifts allow, a mama only turns 69 once in her life, and my mama didn’t always know special.

And those two slices of cheesecake the waitress brought out (on the house) made my mama feel like a princess.

She ooh’d and she ahh’d, and you would have thought it was the best cheesecake in the whole wide world.

Because it was.

We talked about how creamy it was.

We delighted in how delectable it was.

We talked about how it literally was the best cheesecake either of us had ever had in our whole lives.

And then the next day, on our way out of town, we hit the fancy pizza joint and enjoyed lunch, and of course, we ordered cheesecake for dessert, because it was a birthday weekend after all, and birthdays in our family are always meant to be extended.

The waitress at the pizza joint also happened to work weekends at the steakhouse, and when we told her about THE most delicious cheesecake we’d ever had, she mused that the cheesecake at her other place of employment was just cheesecake shipped in from Costco and accentuated with strawberry sauce made fresh at the restaurant.

Because don’t you know that Costco has the best cheesecake in the whole state of Alaska?

She thought everyone knew that.

My mama and I didn’t know that —not being Costco cardholders, how would we?—and as we slowly enjoyed that Day Two slice of mango cheesecake at the pizza joint on our day two of her birthday celebration, we mused about how ironic it was that a nationwide wholesale company was in the business of producing the best cheesecake in the state, and what does it take to be THE best cheesecake in the whole nation?

The creaminess of the mango at the pizza place and the subtle tropical flavor made a stiff comparison to the denseness of the New York style we’d enjoyed the night before.

Day Two Cheesecake wasn’t as thick, wasn’t as traditional, but it brought a freshness and a newness to cheesecake that Day One Cheesecake didn’t have, and what about that crust?

We were soon on our way, mid-afternoon, mid-January in Alaska, growing dark with an hour and a half of drive time ahead, and there we were, on the highway in my SUV, still comparing cheesecakes and their denseness and creaminess and richness and what it would take to be declared the best cheesecake in the country.

We could write it down, Mom!

YES!

We could travel around and compare cheesecakes and be just like the fancy restaurant critics, but just for cheesecakes!

YES!

Everywhere we go, we could order the cheesecake and write up a review, and then we could write a book about it and include recipes and photos…and squished into all of it, we could talk about it all from the perspective of an aging mother and her adult daughter.

YES!

Write it down, Mom.

And she fished out of my bag the planner-journal book I haul around everywhere I go, and even though it always made her carsick to read or write in a moving vehicle, and even though in her generation it was a cardinal sin to turn on the dome light when someone was driving, she did both, and she scrawled it out in my book and later that night after I’d dropped her off, I started a shared file with her for our iPhone Notes app, and we’d add to that list over the next few days, ideas of our little book to-be, The Cheesecake Connoisseurs.

And I didn’t think anything more of it until I went flipping through the pages of that planner today, two years old now, my mama gone from me now almost four months.

The scrawl of my mama…it could have been mistaken for mine, just spread out sloppy on the page…but as I came to those two pages while flipping through my books, I remembered that weekend and, looking twice, I snapped a photo of that spread and set that book aside.

Because how precious was that weekend?

And how many weekends since had I watched my mama decline, losing more and more of her memory and her function, having more and more medical issues creep into her life until she had to give up living independently, moving into her precious cabin on our property, until one day she just slipped away to leave this earth and be with Jesus?

I didn’t know on our cheesecake weekend that I would very soon become my mama’s lifeline.

I didn’t know how quickly old age and underlying medical issues and dementia would take over a body and age a person so fast that the doctors could only chase down what was happening on any given day.

I didn’t know that we’d never have the chance to compare more cheesecake.

I didn’t know that less than two years after our cheesecake weekend she’d be gone.

It’s easy to take the cheesecake story and think the message is to just eat the cheesecake.

That is part of the sentiment, yes.

But what isn’t there is the journey between the cheesecake weekend and my mama leaving us.

How we celebrated her next birthday —her seventieth— on Kauai, her favorite place other than Alaska, with just her, me, and her granddaughters, one of whom was turning eighteen.

How that trip was so very special for her, for us all, and how she soaked up the sun on the island she’d come to love because of traveling with her Alaska family that she held so very precious.

Or how she came to immerse herself into a church family, feeling a sense of belonging she’d never felt in all her life amongst believers in Christ. She spoke of them as she spoke of family, remembering their names when sometimes she couldn’t even remember common words.

Or how she delighted in the fact that she was finally going to see her lifelong dream come true, owning her very own cabin in the woods…only it wasn’t going to be in the woods of Tennessee like she’d always imagined; it was going to be even better, her cabin in the woods was going to be in Alaska.

Or how she still got to work with children, her lifelong mission…serving as a volunteer, side-by-side with her family in the local 4-H program, altering her involvement each year to her capabilities, still always useful and helpful and always, always with a servant’s heart.

Or how she was brave and made new friends, even through her insecurities and anxieties, traveling by driver when she could no longer drive herself to the local senior center, forging bonds with her drivers and those she shared lunches and crafty afternoons with.

Or how our family adjusted our orbit to bring her into its swirling, always-going, fast-circling movement, and how she just rolled with it all, only asking for a strong elbow to walk her across the driveway in the dark to her abode 300 feet away.

There was so much in between.

So, yes.

Order the cheesecake.

Eat the cheesecake.

But write a book about it.

Write a book about the days and the weekends and the months and the years of you and your loved ones…and especially your mama.

Because one day, you’ll find her writing and you’ll smile.

You’ll remember what she once was.

When you were young, but when she was old.

You’ll remember.

You’ll remember her voice.

You’ll remember her writing.

You’ll remember the times you had with her.

The good, the bad, the hard, the challenging, the precious, the frustrating, the beautiful, the growing-up years, the growing-old years…

You’ll remember.

And you’ll miss her.

For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.

Psalm 139:16

“I’m tired, boss…”

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John Coffey said it in The Green Mile, and I reckon we all feel a bit that way these days.

John was a mountain of a man, and he had a gift of healing people. He was convicted of murder and sentenced to death, when in reality, he was only trying to heal the little girl he’d found injured.

Years back, The Green Mile was one of my favorite books, and unlike a lot of Stephen King’s work, which tends to dull from his literary brilliance once the stories are set to film, when The Green Mile was made into a movie, it was made into a good movie.

Michael Clarke Duncan brilliantly embodied the character Coffey, and even with the outstanding lineup of actors in that film, it could be argued it was Duncan who made the movie.

His largeness made him intimidating, but his softness made him vulnerable.

John Coffey was plopped into a world full of injustice and ugliness and was forced to function to the best his abilities allowed.

Stared at. Talked about. Judged. Misunderstood.

“I’m tired, boss. Tired of being on the road, lonely as a sparrow in the rain. Tired of never having me a buddy to be with, or tell me where we’s coming from or going to, or why. Mostly, I’m tired of people being ugly to each other. I’m tired of all the pain I feel and hear in the world every day. There’s too much of it. It’s like pieces of glass in my head all the time.”

I’m tired, LORD.

I’m tired of the hypocrisy.

I’m tired of the ugliness.

I’m tired of the name-calling and angry words and the endless insults and people being mean and divisive and hateful and forgetting that we’re all here together for just a very short time.

It’s like pieces of glass in my head all the time.

It takes one stroll through a comment thread on social media before I daily lose faith in my fellow mankind.

And it takes one stroll through my memories to think of how my Southern grandparents rarely spoke of politics but would joke on voting day that they had just gone to cancel one another’s vote out.

They were married over fifty years, and while I saw many heated arguments between them during my childhood, never once was it about politics. On the day my grandmother died, my grandfather instantly became ready to leave this earth and pass into eternity so he wouldn’t have to be without her. It was sixteen long years before that happened, and every day of those sixteen years he’d tell the LORD how he was ready to go be with her.

They were both raised in the poor South.

His childhood home was the back half of a house set on a cotton plantation and his Daddy and Mama worked their hands to the bone. He left when he lied about his age to go serve his country, and then he went AWOL when his country lied to him about the leave he was promised, and do you know he met my little granny on that leave; a chance meeting that wouldn’t have happened had that bus pulled out on time, just thirty seconds earlier?

If they raised their family any way politically, it could be said they raised us Democrat.

She had been raised just two states over —their accents never left them and even after thirty years of raising their family in the Midwest, I can still hear their yonder and piller and Jaysus and loveyanow, and she loved her mama with all her heart but left for nursing school like her big sister had done, and she wanted to make her mama proud too. She left school when she met that young man on the bus after she’d been home for break, and while her sister graduated and went on to be a nurse, my Grannycakes never did. She cared for children instead, and she taught them about Jesus.

The two of them sang so off-key, my grandparents.

My Grandad joked once coming back from voting across the street at the school…he whispered to me as he came in the door not to tell Granny, but he’d just voted Republican, and he laughed and laughed. That was the most I’d ever heard him speak of politics.

They were the loudest singers in the church, and when they sang together in the kitchen while making hotcakes, we’d take pictures because even then we knew something special was happening in the ordinary.

Their Bibles are two of the very few family heirlooms we own.

They were not without fault.

Deep faults.

It is easy to romanticize a life after that life has left us.

They left us with trauma too.

But that trauma wasn’t over politics.

It was over things that shouldn’t have happened; so many of the same things that happened to the same types of people during that time; things that left life-long wounds.

But they both loved Jesus.

And they tried their best to show us Him and how to love those He gave us, whether it be spouse or children or grandchildren or neighbors.

How to forgive.

How to give grace and how to receive grace.

The two of them lived through the presidencies of Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and my Grannycakes died during Bill Clinton’s tenure. My Grandad saw both terms of George W. Bush and died less than one year into Barack Obama’s term.

Thirteen presidents throughout my granny’s life; fifteen for my grandfather.

They were married long enough to see eleven presidents serve our country.

They both loved JFK. My Grannycakes always cried when she spoke of him.

I’m glad they’re not here today, my grandparents.

I would give every penny I have to call my Grannycakes. Sometimes when I’m driving to town and I just want to talk, I swear I’d give a limb right then and there just to dial that phone number that is forever etched on my heart just so I could hear her delightful squeal at hearing from her only granddaughter, and we’d talk and talk while I drive, and she’d tell me all the small town gossip and how she bought my favorite cereal up at the store today, the kind she always buys special when she knows I’m coming over for the weekend, and I’ll tell her about my babies and how much they’ve grown and how well they’re doing in their jobs and how all their animals are growing strong, and she’ll ooh and ahh over all the baby lambs’ names and tell me how proud she is of my farm girl shepherdess and her hard work and pragmatic mind, and my she’ll brag on my tradesman who would be her superstar because he’s in a foreign land she’s never seen at the tippy top of the world, and she’d go on and on about her eldest great-granddaughter the jetsetter living in the big city working for a high class bakery, and her baby will be the apple of her eye because he’s the baby and such a smarty pants sweetheart, and she’ll want to know every last detail like only grandmas do, and when it’s time to hang up, it’ll take a few minutes and she’ll tell me love ya now at least four times before we finally disconnect, and some days, that’s all I really want is to dial her up, and I can literally hear her voice as though I did call, and really, I’d give anything to do it.

But I’m glad she’s not here.

The world today would break her heart.

She loved people and she wouldn’t know how to be in a world where people don’t love people because of how they voted.

It would tear her up to know that people unfriended her granddaughter because they didn’t agree with her values and opinions.

It would break her to know that members of her own family don’t speak because one felt that everyone should take an experimental vaccine our government pushed, and that those family members had cut from their lives those who felt differently.

It would absolutely crush her to hear that people within the church, sisters in the Body of Christ, removed me from their lives because I expressed disagreement with the progressive Democratic party and its harmful agenda over the past fifteen years.

I pulled away from all we were raised with when I saw what was happening to our world back when things started to shift and the party of my grandparents was no longer the party I knew.

She would support me in that.

But the divisiveness politics has become would kill her to see.

So these days, I have this house and heart full of people we’ve raised to pay attention…to think about what is happening around them…to know how our country was established…to know the history and the heartbreak of all the evils that have been done in the name of power and religion…to know what it means to be a citizen of America…and they have seen their debt increasing, for them and their future children…they have seen their world change at a pace they’ve given up on trying to keep up with, and they have been asked to bend and flex and morph all they know into something this world wants to be the new way of thinking.

We’ve raised them to love the LORD, to love people, and to love their country, and we’ve raised them to think critically, but sometimes, in today’s climate, I wonder if they even care anymore.

Sometimes I think this world has broken our young adults and desensitized them in a way that they may just forget the foundation on which they stand.

We forced them apart for two whole years, asking them not to hug, touch, or socialize in person; we ask them to recognize seventy-two different genders, exhibit acceptance, inclusivity, and an embrace for all, all while we model hatred and insults on social media, exhibiting deep disrespect and schoolyard bullying to anyone subscribing to a different set of opinions as ours; we ask them to pay for the firehose faucet spending of our government, even as we teach them the United States of America belongs to WE THE PEOPLE, which affirms “that the government of the United States exists to serve its citizens.” https://www.senate.gov/about/origins-foundations/senate-and-constitution/constitution.htm

Why would they care?

What should they care about?

Which issue?

Which one of the many social activism issues or government corruption issues or cultural issues or economy issues should they focus on?

They’ve got to be tired too.

And then during one of the many deep discussions we’ve had round here these past months about current events, my daughter, that middle child who avoids social media like the plague but somehow always knows what’s going on in the world and isn’t ever one to mince words even while not caring much about what other folks do, she hears about the Hitler/Trump posts that are circulating, and she says NO. You don’t get to do that. Comparing what is happening right now, right here in America…to compare Trump to Hitler and what Hitler did in the Holocaust, sorry, but no. They don’t get to do that. That is a horror all on its own and to even compare the discomfort of what we may be feeling in America today, what is happening right now, to compare that to what happened to them is insulting to them. No, you don’t get to do that.

She surprises me with the strength and conviction of her words; she stands on what she believes, but she is okay to let other people stand on what they believe in too.

Not on this issue, though.

Then on the random, my youngest baby chooses Schindler’s List for Saturday night movie, and I realize that even though I’d loosened my grip by the time he came along and let him read the Harry Potter books at a younger age than my older ones, and watch many movies at an earlier age than I had the other three…while somehow I’ve seen Schindler’s many times and read the book, my baby had never seen it.

I watched it anew through the eyes of my young man, and tears streamed down my face as I took in the horrors yet again, imagining the absolute fright, the trains, the gunshots, the starvation, the separation of families…my soul churns. I’ve read so many first-hand accounts of Holocaust survivors; I’ve “met” them by way of their stories on news and social media.

How can we compare any time like that time?

How can we compare this time right now to that time?

While my boy usually flits around on his phone or works on his laptop during movie time, Schindler’s List held his attention, even as a black-and-white film would normally be found archaic and boring. He is enough of a history buff to know that this story is important.

The absolute horror of it all.

Nazi Germany committed mass murder on an unprecedented scale. The Nazis and their allies and collaborators killed six million Jewish people. The Nazis and their allies and collaborators also committed other mass atrocities. They persecuted and killed millions of non-Jewish people during World War II. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/en

This time when I own a beautiful home on a little chunk of land that is all mine, with cars in the driveway that have my name on the title, and I drive them to a grocery store where I purchase anything I want with money my family and I have earned, or to an office building where I do my work uninhibited and joyfully, or to a church building in the middle of town where I gather with other people from all different walks of life, but all of us enjoying the same freedoms, and we raise our voices to the LORD God in Heaven with no fear whatsoever of government telling us we can’t?

How can we even compare?

My grandparents tolerated presidents and local politicians and Congress and the House for so many different terms and different parties, and they raised their family, and they worked their jobs, and they paid their taxes, and they owned their home, and they loved their neighbors and their friends and the LORD.


They saw many political changes of the guard, and they understood that was part of life, but that life wasn’t politics.

When did that change?

When did riots become the way of disagreeing?

When did burning and looting become the way we expressed ourselves?

Would they think our current state of affairs was any different than the state of affairs in the 90’s?

“The era of big government is over.” -Bill Clinton, 1996 State of the Union Address

The Clinton-Gore Administration has made the federal government smaller by nearly a quarter of a million jobs. This is the largest, swiftest government-wide cut in the history of the United States. It’s not just a post-Cold War defense reduction; every department except Justice has become smaller…The federal government workforce is now the smallest it has been in more than 30 years, going all the way back to the Kennedy Administration…The cuts were long overdue. People had long since grown tired of new government programs initiated each year, with none ever ending. They were tired of stories about senseless sounding government jobs, like the Official Tea-Taster, tired of larger and larger bureaucracies in Washington interfering more and more with their lives. For years, presidential candidates have been promising to make government smaller. But until Bill Clinton, none delivered…The workforce cuts are saving lots of money…Cutting a quarter million jobs, therefore, can save well over $10 billion annually. But that’s not the half of it. The savings from all the commonsense reforms we have put in place total $118 billion…Put that together with the benefits of our healthy economy, and you’ll see that the Clinton-Gore Administration has come up with another one for the record books: four straight years of deficit cuts, for a stupendous total reduction of $476 billion. 
https://govinfo.library.unt.edu/npr/library/nprrpt/annrpt/vp-rpt96/intro.html

How is this right now any different than that?

How is right now any different than the past four years of one-half of our population being angry and unsatisfied with our government and the Biden administration?

We could talk on and on about the hypocrisy we see playing out before our eyes and the double standards and the fact that when the right was dissatisfied, they let it be known by boycotts and using their voice rather than burning and looting and destruction and hurting people.

But I’m tired of talking about it.

I’m tired.

We The People have become We The Divided, and Jesus said Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation, and every city or house divided against itself will not stand, (Matthew 12:25) and Abraham Lincoln echoed this in his “House Divided” speech when he said, a house divided will not stand.

When did we become not united?

When did we quit respecting one another, or the position of the president, or our civilized society…

and turn into a house divided against itself?

I’m tired, boss.

I’m tired, LORD.

I don’t know the answers.

But I know we are not living in Nazi Germany.

I know that we are still the greatest, freest, most liberal, and citizen-empowered nation on our planet.

And I know that my grandparents lived their life together politically opposite and they raised a family and they served their community and they worked hard all their days and they loved Jesus.

So that’s what I’ll do too.

He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? Micah 6:8

~

“Raise your words, not your voice. It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder.” -Rumi

Too Long

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Sometimes too much time can go by and every passing minute and every passing hour and every passing day… hope gets smaller and smaller.

So when the sow labored in vain and our prayers weren’t answered the way we wanted them to be, the hope got small and the tension got big.

She tired and she weakened and try as she might, she just couldn’t get the job done.

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And when the body doesn’t do what we want it to…and people we love disappoint…and when stress levels heighten… and finances cause strain…and when the unexpected hits…or when disease overcomes…or children break your heart…or prayers aren’t answered the way we hoped…and the world is just too much…

don’t we weaken and tire?

And try as we may, doesn’t it seem like sometimes we just can’t get the job done?

And then time just becomes still with hope too short and it all has just gone on too long…

too long.

We let her labor all day Tuesday and that sweet gal just gave us her friendly new-mama self and she walked and she shifted and she grunted when we’d encourage her and she’d tilt her rounded belly toward us to give my girl better access to both rows of colostrum founts.

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A friend walked the hard and long with us on up til dinner time, cancelling gymnastics for all six of her babies to bring them over to play so she could go elbow deep into mess with us and try to help us find life.

She told us we’d know when it’d been too long.

We would know.

When this world is gross and messy and futile and straining, isn’t there someone who needs us to go elbow deep into their mess? Who needs us to help them find signs of life?

This was the second sow my daughter had troubles with in her new pig-farming venture. We’d already seen our lot of loss on the farm for the spring.

We hoped this one would be just like God and nature intended.

We prayed. We helped. We encouraged.

We trekked the snowy trail a hundred times in the dark.

Wednesday morning we knew.

It’d been too long and we needed to go after life and if we were going to find it, there had to be a death.

Too long.

We trekked the snowy trail one last time and my husband sent her humanely into eternity and together we all went after life.

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We never lost hope and we worked and we prayed and we encouraged.

But there was a huge loss.

It had just been too long.

We gave it all we had but soon it was too long again and we knew it was time to stop striving after death, and when we were done focusing on death, we were left with one life.

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She named him Sean, and I don’t know where you are in your mess of life…

if you’re just starting to strain or if nothing seems to fit or if you’re at death’s door or if you’ve just plain lost hope in the labor.

But what we’ve learned from one bitty pig named Sean is that as long as there is breath in the lungs, there is life… and when there is life, there is hope.

Sometimes nature doesn’t work in our favor, and sometimes God gives and sometimes He takes away and death will come for every one of us sooner than we ever want it to.

But when we turn from death and we focus on life, there is joy and there is faith and there is love.

And when we push and strain and labor and strive to focus on those…we’ll find the gift of life amidst all the death…

and it won’t ever be too long.

~

As for me, I will always have hope; I will praise you more and more. Psalm 71:14

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