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Wherever I’m With You

Posted on by under Guest, Together in Place

My parents left Pittsburgh when I was a toddler, but family lore still recalls me pointing delightedly at its blue and white bus stop signs, imploring, “Stop, bus!” Several times a year we returned, crossing the Pennsylvania Turnpike and the Tubes to visit my Grandma, whose porch housed a galvanized dairy box, although the milkman had long since ceased service by then. On rainy Sundays, my brother and I chased pigeons outside Downtown’s gothic Presbyterian church. Inside we slid down inexplicably existent bowling lanes and sat for children’s sermons at the same poinsettia-laden altar where our parents married years before.

The Steel City coaxed me back for a longer stay the summer before my senior year of college. At the North Side’s Pittsburgh Project, I learned more about justice over three months in community than I had in all my years in the classroom or church. Daily navigating a mysterious tangle of neighborhoods, armed with plucky determination and a stack of MapQuest print outs, my teammates and I discovered how many Pittsburgh “roads” are merely stairwells and how true is the saying, “You can’t get there from here.” I savored my first cherry ice ball from Gus and Yia Yia’s historic cart and discovered the public radio gem that is WYEP.

pghMy official Pittsburgh homecoming occurred the following summer. One week before our wedding and freshly hired at a church mere blocks from the hospital where I was born, Jim and I arrived to scout any apartment within reach of our meager summer camp paychecks: decrepit student housing in Oakland, dingy curiosities in Polish Hill, and an alleged one-bedroom in Friendship consisting of a dark kitchenette and one tiny bathroom atop a stairwell. (The split landing was apparently where a mattress was to go.)

When we discovered a third floor walk-up in a brick Bloomfield row house, we knew our little family of two had come home to the East End at last. Boasting a sunny kitchen outfitted in fifties-era fixtures and compact appliances, Hobbit ceilings, and actual sleeping quarters, the apartment felt palatial at $325 a month. So what if it was accessible only by fire escape and lacked a bedroom door? The Shire was ours, and God bless the youth group parents who dropped off teenagers in the back alley for dinners and movie nights. Great is your reward and greater our memories: climbing out of Allegheny Cemetery that time we got locked in, ice skating and frisbee at Schenley, and cheering graduation at the Mellon Arena.

We owned one car, two bikes, and most everything we needed (excepting perhaps a washer-dryer or savings account). Jim still remembers bike messaging as his favorite job; I remember the way my breath caught when he said he’d been hit by a car and how nearly every dollar he earned seemed to end up at Kraynick’s Bike Shop. We slid down the icy fire escape taking out the trash, walked to Tram’s for pho, and biked downtown to see Wilco at the Point. I celebrated a series of birthdays along Forbes, marching against the Iraq war alongside aging hippies, anarchists, and once, a donkey.

In the Cultural District, we scored rush tickets to RENT, not far from Planned Parenthood where I got my annual exam. Neither Jim nor I dressed up for work, but when we scored free symphony tickets, you know we turned up in our finest at Heinz Hall. We once sat behind playwright August Wilson at a tiny Lawrenceville performance of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, and the only other man I ever saw naked was an actor in a cordoned-off warehouse at the edge of the Strip. The audience shivered on metal bleachers in wool coats and gloves, our breath visible beneath the heat lamps, and he took a shower right there in front of us.

Cockroaches and an absentee slumlord eventually drove us further up Liberty Avenue to an apartment atop Mariani’s Pleasure Bar, where the crashing trash pick-up woke us each morning at three, and the bells at St. Joseph’s called the faithful to prayer. I couldn’t begin to add up how much money we spent on parking tickets or tiramisu from Groceria Italiano next door. From our sticky tar roof, we hosted confirmation classes and friends for hibachi-grilled chicken, and we watched fireworks, movie crews, and bocce tournaments: broke, happy, and in love with each other and our skyline.

It’s been ten years since our exodus for pastures only literally greener, but my heart still races at the sight of yellow bridges and Rick Sebak documentaries, and the memory of rush hour bike commutes along Craig Street. There’s no place like home and no home like between the Three Rivers.

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avi feb 2015“Wherever I’m With You” was written by Suzannah Paul. Suzannah is a Pennsylvania-based religion writer on the topics of liberation theology and embodied faith. When not squeezed into a summer camp dining hall, Suzannah and her family set extra places at their farmhouse table, and she writes love letters to the broken, beautiful Church at The Smitten Word.

 

How to Measure Time

Posted on by under Guest, Season & Place

On Sunday mornings, in preparation for the arrival of small band of 1st and 2nd graders, I make sure a great green felt arrow points to the right small rectangular piece of felt. There are 52 pieces of felt to represent every Sunday of the year in four colors: green, purple, white, and red. They form a circle on the wall like a two-dimensional stonehenge. The most numerous of those felt squares are great green growing Sundays. Next come purple preparation Sundays that come before the great white felt mysteries of Christmas and Easter. Easter has seven white Sundays. The mystery of Easter is such that we have to ponder it for a long time. Almost hidden, where 5:26 would be on a clock, is red hot Pentecost. Red hot Pentecost Sunday is a favorite with the 1st and 2nd graders. They all know that tongues of fire came on red hot Pentecost. We all say, “SSSS” like we’re frying bacon, when we talk about red hot Pentecost.

Even without a great circle calendar, as a preliterate kid I could recite these seasons of liturgical church life. It wasn’t too hard, usually the different colored stoles the priest wore gave it away. Pentecost happened towards the end of spring but before school got out for summer. After Pentecost, came VBS, summer camp, the choir summer musical in between swim team practices, meets, and waiting for the ice cream truck.

Soon after school started and the leaves changed to yellow, orange and red, we celebrated All Saint’s Eve. The entire church was transformed into a playhouse for kids, with crafts, cakewalks, mazes, duck ponds, and face painting. After All Saint’s Eve and its hayrides, two-pound bags of candy and glow-sticks, church entered the purple season of Advent. During Sunday school, all the kids would go to the undercroft (a large fellowship hall complete with stage) and make crafts for an “Advent Make and Take.” Leftover evergreens from trees and trimmings turned into advent wreaths. Plain candles became works of sequin, glitter, and wax stickers. Clothespins became angels with curly hair and perfectly sharpied o-shaped mouths.

The altar guild meanwhile would transform the church with festive evergreen wreaths the size of cars, neatly tied with red ribbons. The live nativity would be set up outside for the Christmas Eve service. With the brick walkways covered in hay or snow, the holy family (actors from the congregation) processed in under a tapestry canopy held by fellow acolytes in long white robes.

How To Measure TimeThe green and red of Christmas decorations would disappear as magically as they arrived, right before Epiphany. The following dreary days of winter lead into another season of purple, my favorite season: Lent. Ash Wednesday is to this day, as it was when I was a morbid nine year old, my favorite service. So solemn, so somber, so deep and beautiful. “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you will return.” The bigger youth groups kids spread rumors that the ash placed on our foreheads was last year’s Palm Sunday branches—a rumor I never confirmed, though there was a catalogue, kept in a cupboard in the sacristy, where they could order ashes, along with acolyte robes and communion wafers.

After Lent, as daylight increased and so did the temperatures, Easter arrived. My brother and sister and I would decide whether we would serve as torch bearers on Palm Sunday, or chalice-bearers at Maudy Thursday’s foot washing service. Some years we would acolyte on Easter Sunday and wear new crosses over our white robes. And every year they would nag us about wearing the proper footwear: NO FLIPFLOPS or TENNIS SHOES.

And after the white of Easter and the red of Pentecost, the church year reset. I would acolyte at weddings and at funerals. I learned by heart the prayers, scriptures, and rhythms of each rite of worship. I knew where the extra robes were for when I spilled wine down my robe in the middle of communion (or the robes of the adult lay ministers; pouring is a tricky business). I read Prayers of the People at the lectern. I taught Sunday school. I lit candles before the service and extinguished them at the end.

My family left this church when I left for college. I’ve never gone back. I’m not sure why and I’m not sure I need to. Because in a way, I don’t think I ever left. How can I leave time itself? The seasons of the church are always there, no matter where I find myself worshiping. I am always home on Sunday, in great green growing Sundays, purple preparation Sundays or the holy, mystical mysterious Sundays of Christmas and Easter. They are the only home I’ll ever need. For they are to me the liturgy of Faith, the hope and the promise of the world to come.

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Hudspeth_Family_0018_2“How to Measure Time” is by Sarah Hudspeth. Sarah is a mom of two kids full of life and mischief, a wife of a grad student, and a middle school math teacher for students with learning needs. Coffee is her favorite, as are books, Twitter (@eviesmomhuds), and any day spent outside. Sarah lives in Durham, North Carolina and eats extremely well due to food trucks, her garden, and the eat-everything-local movement.

Eternal Summer

Posted on by under Guest, Season & Place

I was born in Eternal Summer, but after college in the early 90s, I packed up and moved to the Land of Rain. Grunge on the airwaves and flannel the style, a gray sky matched our melancholy moods. We were the newest tribe of grown-ups in the decade of Smells Like Teen Spirit.

My husband and I met in Land of Rain, just after he moved here from Midwest Farmland. We fell in love, had two kids, built a house and started to make a life. Four months after we settled into the home slated to be ours forever, a career-advancing job offer convinced us to sell and move the family back to where I spent the years of my childhood and adolescence .

Eternal summer was coming! I became giddy in anticipation of sunshine every day. I missed warmth. The damp and cold had been seeping into my bones a little too deeply. When the chance came, I wanted out.

We made the move South in January and entered Eternal Summer during one of the worst rain storms in history. Was this a sign? After a few days clouds passed. My skin received the sun’s welcome like a long, lost friend. Why did I ever leave?

Shorts and flip-flops made up our wardrobes. Our daughters, ages 5 and 3, had permanent white tattoos –  the shape of  bikinis – upon their bronzed skin. Neither left the house without sunglasses or they’d pay with headaches due to squinting out the brightness. Play-dates at amusement parks came to be as common as play-dates in the neighborhood park.

Soon though, I recalled why I left Eternal Summer in the first place.

Thousands of vehicles crowded the streets of Eternal Summer, traffic keeping you hours from your destination. Strip malls and cement lined the ten-lane freeway mazes. Hazy smog prevented pure skies and the corresponding landscape on the ground was dull, save for the well-placed palm trees spaced evenly apart.

Heading to the shore became infrequent. It came to mean loading up a day’s worth of food and toys and towels and chairs, and parking a mile away only to trudge all of said belongings to hopefully land a spot on the hot sand. This lost its appeal quickly. More days were spent at the pool, but even then for a mother it was more taxing than relaxing, ensuring offspring remained safe around the chlorinated water.

One afternoon while paying for my groceries, the clerk made small talk.

     Are you from here?

     Yes and no, I replied, I grew up here, moved North, and now we’re back.

     Aren’t you totally stoked? he asked. I could never live anywhere else.

     Where else have you been?

     Nowhere, he admitted, I’ve never been north of L.A.

I left, feeling pity for this clerk. He’d never experienced living room movie nights, family huddled together on the sofa during rainy Springs.

He’d never watched the leaves explode into brilliant colors before falling off limbs.

He never experienced the joy of waking up to a winter wonderland, hearing “School is closed for the day!” and sledding down hills in the neighborhood.

He’d never felt Summer as a gift from God, where every resident must be outdoors soaking up every bit of brightness and heat mindful this time precious. Folks living in Land of Rain do not take late-June through August for granted.

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And it was then I realized: I didn’t want my daughters growing up without seasons. They needed to live through the changing sky, the re-defining landscape, the emotions of dark versus light. I feared my desire for them to grow as individual and varied as Spring, Fall, and Winter would be hindered by the surrounding messages to conform as though everything needed to be Summer all of the time.

After only two years living in Eternal Summer, we returned to Land of Rain. Sometimes, I long for warmth I once knew. I wish to rid the amount of gear in which I’m clad to simply walk the dog.

However, once the mutt and I are on the trail surrounded by evergreens, small wildlife and friendly neighbors also bundled up but not too miserable for a smile and a wave, I’m filled with gratitude of all around me. For in Spring, I see new growth. In Fall, I reflect with the changing color of the leaves. In Winter, I hibernate. But in Summer, when the sun shines in the Land of Rain, I savor the orb’s rays and am reminded not to take any blessing for granted. In seasons, I can appreciate changes life brings.

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IMG_8720 - Version 3“Eternal Summer” was written by Andee Zomerman. Andee is a teacher, minister, radio host, and writer who cannot decide what to be when she grows up. She has moved up and down the West Coast with her husband and two daughters, now making their home in Portland, OR. Andee spends her days encouraging others to volunteer in their communities via her blog, Nature of a Servant. She’s always on Facebook and tweets under @andeezomerman.

Winter Road

Posted on by under Guest, Season & Place

“Here is something I found to be true: You don’t start processing death until you turn thirty. I live in visions, for instance, and they are cast out some fifty years, and just last year I realized my visions were cast too far, they were beyond my life span.” – Donald Miller, Through Painted Deserts

I’m not quite at thirty yet. I turn 27 in May. I’m not exactly contemplating death, but is has become less of an abstraction. A sound I didn’t think would accompany my 20s is a constant companion: My day is filled with the hiss of air. Not a cold blast blowing down from the Blue Ridge Mountains, but a purer kind of winter air, the kind run through a rubber tube to my father so he can breathe easier. The constant hiss of the air being pushed into his lungs is a reminder—a tangible metaphor of the end that is approaching us all.

Like many of my peers, I am out of college, unemployed and living at home—though my situation isn’t quite the norm. Instead of spending my days job searching, I sit at home and goof off on the internet. (Ok that’s typical of people in my situation.) At least that’s what I do until my father gets up and I roll his oxygenator into the living room and remind him to take his pills, check his blood sugar and then get him breakfast.

I don’t know many in their twenties who have to confront the mortality of a parent, at least not in the way I do. My seventy-nine year old father sits in his chair pretty much every day now and reads and watches TV. We are at opposite ends, he and I. I’m longing to be fully into the summer of my life, waiting for a career, a wife and perhaps a family; while he sits near the end of his life, his career gone and his family scattered around the country.

I worry about so much these days. It’s a suffocating feeling to be trapped in a space you feel you can’t get free from. My father feels much the same way, especially being stuck inside for the Winter Roadwinter months because of the cold. Yet, he doesn’t worry like I do. “God has a plan,” he says. “Maybe, I don’t know if I trust it though,” I reply. If I were in his position I would not be as calm and trusting in God. But throughout it all my dad has kept this serenity about everything, despite age and health conspiring to bring him down.

It used to be I thought thirty was old. Now I look at people in their fifties and think, that’s not so bad! I worry about my next fifty years and what will happen, and it’s then I remember that if I should last that long I’ll be almost the same age as my father is now. I look at him and wonder if my life will follow a similar script. We are alike in so many ways; both of us a bit stubborn and yet willing to discuss and debate everything. And yet, I wonder if I will be as serene when my own winter comes.

It was at thirty-eight that Robert Frost wrote, “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening.” At that age, he was just 20 years before the end of life expectancy for people of that time. Looking out his window, he knew that the spectre of the end was creeping up on him. But at a time when most of us would be in a mid-life crisis, he was less concerned, talking about his promises to keep and miles to go before he slept. It was just six years before he wrote “The Road Not Taken,” which ends like this: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I – I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.

As I sit on the couch I look at my father, knowing he’s tried the road more traveled by, a life without God and supposedly without consequences. He returned to the narrow lane when he returned to his faith. I have to agree with Frost: It has made all the difference—for him and for me. Without it, this last phase of his life would be much colder and more of a struggle.

I think when you’re younger the road more travelled seems like the best option. I’ll admit I think about taking it instead of the narrow one. But when I look at how calm the winter of my father is I know it’s the wrong choice. Taking the narrow road will always be unnerving. There are more obstacles in your way, sometimes you must choose between honesty and success, your integrity or comfort. But if you’re lucky, the weathered signposts will be there—the ones put up in the winters before you, with the handwriting you know so well. That is how you know you’re on the right path.

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10387502_685529957081_2815207386496696502_n“Winter Road” was written by Michael Hadley. Most of Michael’s time has been spent migrating between Chattanooga, TN for college and Asheville, NC where his parents live. For a semester he lived between the communications department, Starbucks, and Barnes and Noble; his addiction to books and coffee is what drives him. Currently he is freelancing in Asheville, NC and Chattanooga, TN hoping to find a “real” job. His work can be found at MichaelHadley.org and his wit on twitter @MCHadley

The Sunshine State

Posted on by under Guest, Season & Place

Florida has two seasons: summer and January. And flip flops can (and should) be worn during both.

Cradled between the Atlantic Ocean and its more laidback cousin, the Gulf of Mexico, it quietly putters along while the states above it tromp through seasons and mark time in the usual fashion. Like Peter Pan’s Neverland, Florida is a green, sun-soaked playground where April is indistinguishable from October and a staggering array of flowers blossom year-round between gumbo-limbo trees and cabbage palms.

Jax BeachTo a nine-year-old child like me, born in the grubby northeast corner of Arkansas, Florida was a revelation—a land of limitless azure skies filled with cotton candy clouds and a salt-tinged breeze. I spent days hunting for sharks’ teeth at Venice Beach, trail riding through acres of slash pines and saw palmettos (always on the lookout for fat yellow spiders), tubing the Ichetucknee River, and prospecting for balls in the water hazards that dotted the state’s ubiquitous manicured golf courses.

Though I grew up, the landscape changed much more gradually than I did. Sadly, once empty property is now filled with the ubiquitous, inescapable trappings of modern society—chain restaurants and grocery stores. Gas stations and home improvement warehouses. A Starbucks on every corner. But my elementary school, the place where I learned about Seminole Indians and fell in love with C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia, is still there, a larger parking lot and bike corral its only signs of growth.

My grandparents’ home is still there too, a two-story structure of weatherworn bricks surrounded by a sun-bleached and slightly warped wooden fence. It’s the place where I perfected my backstroke in their kidney-shaped pool and lazed away the afternoon on a lounge chair, a bowl of Schwann’s rocky road ice cream in my lap. The place where we celebrated countless Christmases and birthdays and where my aunt and uncle—and later my husband and I—were wed by my great uncle James in front of the coquina fireplace in the living room.

In a state where the Fountain of Youth burbles away, The Mouse still turns a brisk trade in his Magic Kingdom, and the seasons never change, it’s all too easy to forget that time isn’t a renewable resource and that, for everyone who lives there, it will eventually run out.

Between the home I love and the school I remember is a small structure—one that has served both as a law office and a police sub-station. But it is now an assisted living facility for people who have dementia or Alzheimer’s disease, and my grandfather is one of the people who calls it home.

Like the beach he once enjoyed, which is siphoned grain by grain back into the sea, he is being pulled away from us by the tide of time. And there is no regaining what has been eroded, no reclamation project that can bring him back. It’s a hard truth to witness in a place filled with the delightful lie of endless sunshine.

I now live in Georgia and experience the passing of time as others do—season by season. Summer lingers longer here than it does most places, and autumn is far shorter than I’d like. There is winter too, a span of months where leaves wither and fall into doleful piles, leaving their trees naked and exposed to the same cold winds that slice through my bones no matter how many layers of clothing I pile on.

But because I experience those bitter months, I’m all the more appreciative of the spring that is sure to follow. I want to cheer when the Japanese Red Maple in my front yard once again dons its ruby-colored cloak and my husband’s bees begin the work of restocking their hives. Witnessing it all has helped me accept that for everything there is indeed a season, a time for everything under heaven. What is born will die. What is planted will be plucked up. I will weep and mourn at times, yes, but I will also have cause laugh and dance again. And one day, I’ll live in a land that knows no seasons and where death no longer holds sway.

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Jamie A. Hughes“The Sunshine State” was written by Jamie A. Hughes. Jamie is a writer, editor, and unapologetic St. Louis Cardinals fanatic who currently lives in Atlanta, GA with her husband and two needy cats. A former high school teacher, she now works as the managing editor of In Touch Magazine and is struck dumb by her good fortune. She blogs at tousledapostle.com and can be found on Twitter @tousledapostle. 

Apples and Honey

Posted on by under Guest, Season & Place

I have never been much of a gardener, nor someone who relishes yard work and the natural rhythms of planting and harvesting. This is probably because in the first decade of my adult life I moved five times—in four different countries. Occasionally my apartments might have hosted a few pathetic geraniums, but both physically and metaphorically, those years were not ones in which I was “putting down roots.” I was a traveler and a missionary, perpetually single, and free of family demands.

Free too, of the connection, rootedness and sanity that comes with being cared for within a family day in and day out.

One particularly lonely September I was teaching in Lithuania, feeling as forlorn and shriveled as the last brown leaves clinging to northern European trees I didn’t even know the names of, when a friend brought me a bag of apples from her family’s trees. She also brought me a jar of dark-colored honey, a small portion of a gift she’d received, more than she could eat on her own.

Putzing around my kitchen that weekend, I decided to see what I could cook with apples and honey. Finding a recipe for apple-honey cake on a webpage devoted to Jewish cooking, I discovered that apples and honey are traditionally eaten during the Jewish New Year. Together, they are meant to symbolize the hope of sweetness in the coming year. My friend had unknowingly brought me apples and honey mere days before the September High Holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

Psalm 81 is a traditional Psalm of Rosh Hashanah, during which the shofar trumpets are blown and God reminds them: “I am the LORD your God, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt. Open your mouth wide, and I will fill it.” Of all the things I expected from that coming year, I could not, in the particularly grey autumn of single almost-30, have believed that an apple-honey cake held any hope for sweetness ahead. Hope was running very thin, and after many years of missionary sacrifice and relational disappointments, I suspected that when God commanded that I open wide my mouth, I would be getting bland, dutiful manna, not honey.

Nevertheless, the end of Psalm 81 promises:“He would feed you with the finest of wheat, And with honey from the rock I would satisfy you.” Where a Protestant might just see ingredients, a Jew sees promises, so I baked my cake, invited friends over to share it, and tried to muster some belief that what lay ahead would be sweet.

But it wasn’t.

The grey, both within and without, got a lot greyer, and that northern European winter was colder than it had been in decades. I learned how to wear loneliness like a tattered coat. I moved back to the States before the next school year and took the least-missional job I could find. It was a difficult, wrenching, decidedly non-sweet year.

And so was the next. The year after that, thanks to counseling, sunshine and exercise, was a little bit better.

The year after that I got married. I moved into my husband’s house in Colorado and discovered that amongst the twenty trees on our lot—mostly locust, maple and aspen—there are two apple trees. They take some serious effort to maintain. They have to be pruned and shaped, watched for fire-blight. When overripe apples fall on the lawn, they rot and kill the grass. In September we spend several weekends on ladders, shoveling the bounty of apples into box after box, giving them away to friends, coworkers, neighbors, and whoever will take some of the abundance off our hands.

Each year, I’ve made the apple-honey cake again, in an old yellow Bundt pan. I grease the pan liberally so the sticky batter of apples, spices, honey and brewed coffee will come out clean and brown. Last weekend, I pulled one of the gallon-sized Ziplocs of sliced apples from my freezer and made the cake to take to friends who just had their second baby. As we ate it together, our son and their daughter chased each other around the kitchen.

I don’t quite know when I first felt these new roots taking hold. My personal story could have just as easily continued to be one of perpetual motion, but somehow instead, I’m living in the suburbs, learning how to care for fruit trees. Instead of feeling like a single, severed branch, I live in a rhythm of seasons. There is honey and sweetness. But I know it is, as the Psalm says, honey from a rock, sweetness that has been wrung from hardness. And sweeter for it.

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J Fueston Photo 2“Apples and Honey” was written by Jennifer Stewart Fueston. Jennifer writes in Longmont, Colorado where she lives with her husband and young son. She has taught writing at the University of Colorado, Boulder, as well as internationally in Hungary, Turkey, and Lithuania. She recently published a chapbook of poetry, Visitations, with Finishing Line Press. She blogs very sporadically at jenniferstewartfueston.com and has just realized she uses Twitter (@jenniferfueston) primarily during playoff football.

Seasons Don’t Change On Time

Posted on by under Guest, Season & Place

Southern California doesn’t really submit to the whole concept of “seasons.” Southern California has 85-degree weather whenever it feels like it, which is about 11 months per year.

The 30-or-so days of cloudiness, chill, and sometimes even rain that we do receive annually are spread out in seemingly random two- or three-day sets throughout the year. There are inevitably  a couple of “unpleasant” days around Halloween, just enough to make people worry about outdoor carnivals. Then, usually a few days in March, which are generally welcomed because they bring out the bright yellow daffodils in time for my birthday. Of course, around Christmas when we would love to enjoy a hot holiday drink from Starbucks and a rainy day, we can’t find a cloud in the sky or any temperatures below 75 degrees. Find us in California struggling to enjoy iced pumpkin spice lattes. It’s just not the same.

I’ve lived in Southern California for my whole 26 (almost 27) years of life, and I continue to be caught off guard by the unpredictable, albeit lovely and temperate, weather here. I allow myself to be caught up in these idealistic concepts of what the holiday season or springtime will be like and then find myself so often disappointed when it’s too hot to take a springtime walk or there are no such things as snowflakes for 100 miles in any direction from my house. And then every once in a while, right when I think “It’s always nice in June,” I’ll plan a barbecue and it pours rain for a few hours and we have to move inside. That’s the rare case, but it just goes to show me that I can never be sure what is coming next.

ca seasons 6This Groundhog Day, February 2nd, reminded me yet again that our weather never follows anyone else’s rules. On the one hand, Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow, which predicted six more weeks of winter. On the other hand, California cares nothing for Pennsylvania’s predictions  about our weather, and we had our first 80+ degree temperatures of the new year. The calendar says it is supposed to be winter until March 21, but here, we already look like summer time with our shorts and hammocks.

As I joked with my coworkers about the heat wave in February, I recognized for maybe the first time that there could be something profoundly beautiful about the fickleness of the weather. Maybe I could appreciate that seasons do shift, even when it is unpredictable. Perhaps there could be rejoicing in the knowledge that unexpected disappointment may sometimes skip hand-in-hand with unexpected excitement.

In a similar way, at some point during my 20s I had determined that this season of my life was supposed to look a certain way. I used to expect this to be the springtime of life, when things are all rose gold and princess cut and little pink lines. When things didn’t fall into place for me that way, I thought, “Well, then, it must be a season of winter!” I could choose contentment in the paycheck and the late night drives with friends for no reason and having enough time to take voice lessons.

Just when I think that I’ve nailed things down exactly the way they are, it’s all changing again. All of a sudden my life is full of daisies and gleaming sunlight and exhales that turn into smiles without my permission. Perhaps I will never figure out what’s coming next, in my life, or in the Southern California skies. Maybe I’ll learn, though, to embrace  the uncertainty and pick daffodils to collect on my table while they are blooming.

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SarahLpic“Where Seasons Don’t Change On Time” was written by Sarah Rose Lochelt. Sarah is a Southern-California native who works at a local Christian university near her home in Glendora. She studied youth ministry for her Bachelor’s degree and counseling ministry for her Master’s degree, and wishes she could get paid to read books for a living. On any given day, you can find her choosing food based on texture, laughing until she cries, and commenting about how “the book was better than the movie.” She blogs, and also writes movie reviews for Mike & Rusty’s UK site on the side.

Chicago was spring, Philadelphia Autumn

Posted on by under Guest, Season & Place

I am sitting in a guest room that was once my room at my parents’ home. I’m typing away with my feet propped up on a box and my computer on top of an antique vanity that belonged to my great-grandmother. The years have cycled back, the way they do, to the first season. The room is mine again.

The red Georgia clay and the bare winter limbs on the oaks outside are part of the season that birthed me 32 years ago. I joke with my parents that I am the poster-child for the boomerang generation. Three cross-continent moves, a graduate degree, and a couple “adult” jobs under my belt, but here I am typing away at a vanity where I can see my name that I etched into the wood as a kid.

On my first cross-country move I landed just north of Chicago, a ten-minute walk from the shore of Lake Michigan. It was a land of straight and flat roads, crossing at hard-right angles until you got to the shore where sand and rocks met vast water. I had a spot near the lake—a tree arched over the edge of the water and every season I marveled at the changes there. I once waded waist-high in snow drifts to get close to the icy lake. I watched in awe as the weather changed from week to week. For the first time in my life I knew what it was like to ache for the coming of spring, to see the green shoots of grass start growing as the slushy, dirty snow finally melted.

In Chicago, the beauty of the Lake and the beauty of the architecture fed my soul in tandem. Chicago introduced me to myself in a way that’s only possible when you flourish somewhere brand new. As a suburban girl, I barely knew my neighbors, but here I passed them on the sidewalk regularly as we all walked to the train or the coffee shop or church.

When spring came, we all went outside. The two elementary school children across the street played football with their dad in the front yard, Henry the beagle and his caretaker made frequent trips around the block; I chatted with the next door neighbor about plants as I edged my lawn right next to her driveway. There was an annual block party and an Easter-egg hunt. My introverted self means I can’t tell you the names of many of these people, but I was drawn to the community and togetherness–these seeds of community burrowed into my heart.

And when the season in Chicago was done, I landed in the hills and valleys of Eastern Pennsylvania to attend seminary. Here, I would check the weather for rain and plan my life accordingly. When it rained the basement flooded and blocked my path to the washing machine for a day. The roads flooded in such a way that my old car protested and sputtered over every puddle.

But on pretty days I’d sometimes find myself on a hill in the beautiful Valley Forge National Park, textbook and pen in hand as I did my reading for my seminary coursework. During those years the theology I studied and learned began to stitch together the pieces of my life. I was desperate to know if I was changing, or just growing. Had my years as an educator and a non-profit worker,  my experiences as a single woman and a fat woman, my understanding of God learned in a suburban Southern church and an urban Midwestern church  finally all come together to produce who I was?

That last year in Pennsylvania was a bountiful harvest. I had seen the beauty of community while watching my Chicago neighborhood, I got to live it in Pennsylvania where every Sunday night neighbors gathered together for dinner. Relationships were deep and meaningful. Ideas and hopes and dreams were always close at hand. After a lifetime of not knowing what I was passionate about, I finally had answers (to some things!). There were places where I could voice a firm “yes” or “no.”

Those passions and ideas unexpectedly led me back to Georgia, a move not for work or grad school, but a choice to be near family. There is a lot that is uncertain for me about life back in Georgia. While I found a worthwhile reason to move, one that was born out of the community I experienced with people who had been strangers,  my current situation lacks the structure to define my day’s activities. There is a freedom to find what will shape my life here. It is planting season: time to sow the seeds I reaped from a Pennsylvania harvest, first nourished in a Chicago spring.

The dark wood of this old vanity and the even-older red clay outside remind me that there are roots already here. This very specific plot has nurtured my beginnings before. A harvest will come again.  Now, counting on the hope of spring and the bounty of autumn, I sow.

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fall“Chicago was Spring, Philadelphia Autumn” was written by Nicole Morgan. Nicole has lived near Chicago, IL; Philadelphia, PA; and in a handful of lesser known Georgian towns. She loves discovering, and falling in love with, the parts of these communities that make them unique. She currently lives in her childhood home near Atlanta, GA, writes about bodies, theology, and community at jnicolemorgan.com  and tweets away @jnicolemorgan

 

Diapers & Degrees

Posted on by under Guest, Role & Place

It was around noon, and I was in the men’s room at Target with my five-month-old daughter. The wall-mounted Koala changing table had seen better days, but I was just glad there was one in the men’s room at all. It was clear, though, that installing the changing table was an afterthought because it completely blocked access to the hand dryers. As my daughter squirmed and screamed while I changed her diaper, other men had to decide whether to reach over my shoulder to dry their hands, or to just use their pants. I struggled to maintain composure, wishing I could say that was the only time I had cried in Target that week. As I finished up I asked myself through eyes filled with tears, “How had my life come to this?”

The past year has been one of shifting roles. I quit a tour-guiding career of eight years (which is long for a 30 year old), became a father, and finished grad school. With my new roles came a shift not only in what I do, but also in who I am.

The biggest transition has been from working 40-60 hours a week to being the primary caretaker of my daughter. I have never been good at errands—even simple errands done on my own would exhaust me. So, the prospect of running most or all of the errands for our family with a baby was daunting, if not petrifying. It did not go well at first, which made me question whether I could even be a stay-at-home dad. I wanted so badly to take care of our daughter so my wife wouldn’t have to run errands and care for the home as well as work. The chalkboard-painted wall I used for my to-do list was a constant source of anxiety motivating me more to escape and watch Netflix than to be productive.

Thankfully I started to get better. I hadn’t realized how much practice errands and housekeeping would take in order to do it well. Over the past four months, since defending my thesis, I have grown tremendously in my competency as a stay-at-home dad. I can even enjoy multitasking—managing a list of things to do all while keeping a 10 month old alive and happy. That’s not to say everything is perfect. My daughter’s newest favorite pastime—pulling her bib off while I’m feeding her—is a lot for me to handle, and I get jealous seeing my wife come home and have so much energy to play with her and make her laugh while I often can only muster the energy to prevent her from melting down. I’m sure this too shall pass and I am getting better at finding joy in the present with her and cherishing every little step in her development.

When I’m not chasing after my increasingly fast and destructive daughter, I am attempting to start a career. After years of work and late night study sessions I finally finished grad school in December, and I am applying for teaching jobs. There is a sense of being in the wilderness during this transition, not knowing the path or even the destination. Early on I was feeling lost and hopeless about job prospects. This brought about financial worries and brought up deep insecurities around my fear of being rejected or passed over by prospective employers. You might even call it a mini existential crisis. After some great encouragement from a friend and my wife, and a lot of prayer, these feelings have lessened. I have come to see being in the wilderness as an important experience that allows me to develop patience and reflect on other shortcomings and insecurities. I’ve even been able to see very clearly the providence of God through a few extra jobs and medical expense reimbursements and aide.

IMG_0109Practicing patience and silence is difficult in a time where all I want to do is stress and vacillate between escapism and attempting to solve everything on my own because God is taking too long. Thankfully I have an adorable little companion to practice with and learn from. This morning I spent time in the amazing San Francisco Botanical Gardens with her. As I pushed my daughter in her stroller, along the small dirt paths through the Native California garden, I talked to her about each of the different plants that we passed and we sat and admired them together. Sometimes she would reach out to grab the plants. Taking time to feel, smell, and taste them, to experience them for the first time. At one point she grabbed a California Poppy, my favorite flower which I learned to love during my years driving a bus. This particular poppy was the only one in bloom in the entire garden. I watched her discover for the first time something I have loved and cherished for years. It was so beautiful. I’m not sure what it means, if it means anything, but I will never forget the overwhelming feelings of love for my daughter and God’s love for me in that moment in the garden.

Being a stay-at-home-dad and struggling to find work was never in my five- or ten-year plan. I may have never asked for this experience, and I did not know what it would require of me, but I am grateful for it. There will certainly be other unexpected roles that will challenge me in the future, and I will greet them with fear and trembling knowing that whatever they are, they will bring me closer to God.

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Gluch Bio Pic“Diapers and Degrees” was written by Danny Gluch. Danny grew up in the suburbs of LA with his parents and older brother. He moved to the Bay Area in 2002 and has enjoyed calling San Francisco home ever since. Currently, he, his wife, their daughter, and their dog Madison call the Mission District of SF home. After struggling to find an enjoyable area of graduate study, he found the Philosophy program at San Francisco State University, where he recently earned his MA writing his thesis in Feminist Ethics and Moral Psychology. Any extra time is spent with his church community, or playing golf (or practicing golf, or thinking about golf). Find Danny on Twitter @danandstephinsf.

Scarves & High Heels: The Layers of Personal Geography

Posted on by under Guest, Role & Place

I was fresh out of grad school and decided that if I just wore high heels and scarves I’d be taken seriously in the classroom. Because at 5’2″ and just a few years older than my college students, I needed something to communicate big words like “authority” and “stature” and “smart” and “serious.” I walked around that campus with the air of someone who knew what she was about, who knew her subject matter and who knew how to teach.

But I felt like I was playing a giant dress-up game called life.

And then real life happened, by which I mean, life in the dailyness of washing dishes, and learning how to love, and making the bed, and grocery shopping. Life full of the glorious mundane. And then there is the life that happens when you add lives to your own, and spend your hours changing diapers, and making dinner, and trying to make meaning from the crying, the napping, and developmental milestones.

So slowly, as we moved from Los Angeles, to San Diego, to Salt Lake City, and as I moved from student to professor to mother, this “game” of life took on a bedrock finality where I had to concede I was, in fact, grown up. I didn’t need high heels or tomes on my bookshelf. I had a mortgage and a minivan full of kids to prove it.

It just took me to my mid-thirties and seven moves—one international—to begin to feel at home in myself.

Each place has whittled me down based on who I am becoming in each place. As I turn the pages of my past selves, each place holds for me a tender space with an accompanying nostalgia akin to flipping through old photo albums. Each place gives a geography to the chapters of me.

Each place we’ve lived has shown me more of who I am and more of who God is. Each has evidenced a terrible beauty. The painful beauty of becoming. Every home has shown me how wide and deep the Kingdom of God is and that there are good gifts in each spot; that there are always people who need you and whom you can connect to one another. Each place has stripped me a bit bare.

Los Angeles laid claim to my know-it-all-ness, as I put on my grad school knowledge like a scarf and found it lacking. For all the learning in the world couldn’t tell me about marriage, and sacrifice, and how to balance work with new motherhood. San Diego showed me my idol of my self-sufficiency as I floundered with two children under two. I felt helpless and at sea, having left the pats-on-the-back of academia and instead, spent my days pushing a double stroller up and down hills at the zoo.

And now, in what many consider the conservative capital of the US, I have been given bravery in Salt Lake City. It’s a city dominated by the LDS temple, the center point around which the city’s grid system is based. And yet, there are other factions which orbit that hub—factions that challenge, and augment, and move gracefully around the dominant religious culture. It’s made being a Christian here something exotic; and even with the pressures of four children, a college ministry and a dominant religious culture of which I’m not a part, Salt Lake City has birthed my voice.

Places do that. They push and pull at who we think we are and stretch us into who we are becoming.

Places, if we let them, usher us into a multi-orbed story, where in each new place we carry our past layers, have the freedom to shed some old ones, and to don new ones.

Places finally take up residence in our souls, not for their amenities and attractions, but for how they birth us into new people. And how, after awhile, we can look back at each place with a certain fondness after the terror of becoming has abated.

So as I string those dear places together—as connected dots on a world map—I’m reminded that there is no space that is too unlovable, too hard, or too unattractive. And, as we anticipate another move this summer, I’m looking forward to another dot on the map that I will weave my story around, and in whose stories I will be woven.

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ashley

“Scarves & High Heels” was written by Ashley Hales. Ashley is passionate about helping others to tell their scary brave stories. When she’s not stealing time to write at Circling the Story, she’s chasing her four kids or helping out with her husband’s college ministry in Salt Lake City, Utah. She also holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Edinburgh. You can read more of Ashley’s work on her blog, or follow her on Twitter or Facebook.