Category Archives: Guest

Coming Home

Posted on by under Guest, Home & Place

I had just been through a broken world experience and was now living in a broken world on account of inappropriate affection that led me away from God and into sin. A father of three, a plastic surgeon by profession, a founder of a major Christian movement in the Asia Pacific region and here was I, trying to put together the pieces to do a ‘make-over’—one that would look real from the outside even if it was still broken on the inside.

I am reminded of the words written by another doctor called Luke who gives a detailed account of the happenings the past nine months must have been for the mother of Jesus of Nazareth when he wrote after the visit of the shepherds in a town called Bethlehem, “But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart”.

As each day passes and the year draws to an end, I ponder in my heart what were ‘all these things’ that happened this year that I can treasure and the rest discard. To be honest, I will not discard anything because every ‘thing’ that took place in my life was of my own doing. Some people are good at burying past events but I can never seem to do that. In my field of practice, I deal with scars all the time. Scars do not disappear but only fade with time. They will always be there. But as I recall all that has happened to me, good and bad, right and wrong, I realize that they have been ‘coming home’ happenings that have led me to seek out the plague in my own heart and with folded hands turn to God for mercy and forgiveness.

The Scriptures remind us that God is faithful and will, with the temptation, also make a way to escape, that we may be able to bear it.

Able to Bear It? As a father, as a spouse, as a doctor, as a friend to another, the ability to bear all the scars inflicted this year can be difficult. When patients seek advice for scars, I show them scar tapes, scar creams, lasers, scar gels and the list goes on but as I treasure up all these things and ponder them in my own heart, I know one place where the scars seem to just somewhat ‘disappear’ and that is at Calvary, at the foot of the cross of Jesus of Nazareth. What God does not protect us from, He will perfect us through – Robert C. Frost

In a few days my second son, David, will be coming home for Christmas. Will my three children ever know what this year has been for their daddy? Will I know what the year has been for each of them as their father? But this I do know that we have a Righteous Father in heaven who knows what ‘Coming Home’ means when His own Son returned from Calvary in glory.

As I gather my three children together this Christmas, I have only one message for each of them: Coming Home for Christmas can only bring the fullest of glory to God when we see Bethlehem in the light of the ‘Old Rugged Cross’ at Calvary. Only then can we experience the full meaning of what it is to come home from a broken world and into a world of peace, love and joy where theCharles walking out of Mulu Caves, Sarawak, Malaysia Spirit of God reigns eternal.

It is like walking out of a cave enveloped in darkness and into the dawn of the light of life. Truly a ‘Coming Home’ experience that is deeply engraved in the labyrinth of the soul.

*   *   *   *   *

Dr Charles Lee“Coming Home” was written by Charles Lee. Charles, who lives in Sabah, Malaysia, is a husband, a father, a plastic surgeon and founder of a Christian Discipleship movement called APCOD. He spends most of his time in the operating theatre, playing the guitar or cycling. He blogs at Awaken the Dawn.

 

Hole in the Wall

Posted on by under Guest, Home & Place

I’ve shared room 205 with the same roommate for three years now. Early on, the two of us forged a haphazard sort of system to keep the room habitable. But we’ve never been neat about it. We’re close friends with the girls in the dorm room next door, and the four of us are constantly spreading ourselves out between the two spaces. The unique transiency of college has permeated our way of living, almost subconsciously, and we never seem to be all the way settled in.

I never imagined I would live in a place this messy. The closets in our room perpetually overflow. Empty Capri Sun juice pouches sit on the windowsill. There is a hole in the concrete block wall that we duct tape every year on move-in day, afraid of what would crawl through otherwise. Recently, my roommate’s birthday cake sat out on a plate for over a week, becoming crunchy before it occurred to us that we should throw it away.

My room at home, though, has become even more pristine since my absence. The walls are white and the closet is bare and the trash can is empty. At home, I wake up and am completely alone. But always, after I drive the four hours home and I sleep and wake in my own bed, I am more reminiscent for the noise than appreciative of the quiet. I miss has become the mantra of college breaks.

*   *   *   *   *

Home, for the first time in my life, is a fluid concept, always seeming to be where I am not. Family is even more ambiguous . My family, of course, includes my mom and dad, my brothers and sister, all of whom I deeply love. But if a family consists of the people who know where you are and love you despite it, then my family is also a cobbling of young adults, mere semesters away from dispersal. I still have close ties to the place in which I grew up, but each year they are changing. We are selling the house with the pristine bedroom, and I find myself largely apathetic. It is only a place to sleep.

The place in which I live from August to May is different. It is where life together is made rich and loud and colorful. After we move out, our beloved room with the hole in the wall and the small closets and the overenthusiastic heater will be exposed for what it is. There was nothing intrinsically special about those concrete blocks or the bedframes or the thin carpet; they were only bare spaces for us to learn to fill. They will be passed on to new freshmen, who will peel our duct tape off of the hole in the wall and solve the problem in their own way.

*   *   *   *   *

Next year, instead of sharing a dorm room, we will get an apartment, and we will decorate for our climactic last year together. We will hang colorful shower curtains. We will carry oversized couches up the stairs. We will string twinkle lights and maybe even make our beds for once. We’ll have roommate pasta dinners and Waffle Tuesdays. I’m just as excited as I am apprehensive for this brief, beautiful time together. The more I come to love where I am, the more I believe that it is home, the more it will hurt when the time comes to leave.

And yet, in this moment, this is my family, and this is my home.

 *   *   *   *   *

juniors_christmas_banquet“Hole in the Wall” was written by Veronica Toth. Veronica is a junior English major at Taylor University (located in approximately the middle of nowhere, Indiana). She’s grown to love cornfield country and especially the people who live there. She enjoys occasionally writing poetry and always using sarcasm. Veronica is pictured on the far left with three close college friends; they do not keep dorm rooms clean, but they do love each other. She blogs at Tasting Twice.


Moving House

Posted on by under Guest, Out of Place

Late last year, I attempted to move into a house not owned by my parents. I sat down with a potential roommate (a friend of a friend) and we established that although we were strangers, neither of us was too strange.

I began to haunt Craig’s List for homes in our price range (which was somewhere between “it has a lot of personality” and sleeping with a gun).

I fell in love with the first house we saw. It was over a hundred years old with beautiful wood floors and a mantelpiece. There was an enclosed porch on the second floor and I could just see my writing desk there with a cup of tea on it, curling steam.

“I want this little yellow house,” I said, after the current renter had left and my not-yet roommate and I were left alone in my car.

“You can’t fall in love with the first place we go,” he said.

But I did.

At my insistence, we drove to the property management company and even began to fill out applications before we realized that the numbers didn’t add up. To qualify to rent this house, we would need another roommate, at least (and it had been hard enough to find each other). Still, I kept hoping.

*   *   *   *

We walked through apartments which looked as though they hadn’t been redone since the seventies (with prices to match). We toured buildings with tiny washing machines, and pools in the complex, and the chance of a garage (if there was a vacancy).

The whole process made me tired, and I kept thinking about that little house.

*   *   *   *

“Apartments are fine,” I said. “But houses just have so much more character, don’t you think?”

We had just realized that we were truly torn over something important. I wanted wood floors, he did not. We were both convinced that the other simply didn’t understand the facts.

“Sure,” he said. “But there’s so much more to take care of in a house.”

He didn’t get it. After years of living in places I couldn’t control, I wanted someplace to care for, some place to love.

“Let’s just see,” I said. “Maybe if we find the right house.”

*   *   *   *

I went to our last showing alone. I didn’t intend to, but my would-be roommate got lost. So, I stood in another little yellow house (apparently I’m strangely drawn to yellow houses) and chatted with the representative of the management company, trying desperately to act like I knew what I was talking about as I asked questions.

StricklandhouseThere are lots of different kinds of little yellow houses. As I think back on it now, with its empty laundry room, draped with blackout curtains and central hood location, this one would have made a good drug house.

This little yellow house, a bit worse for wear, was across the street from the Salvation Army, and two buildings in from Planned Parenthood.

There was a handy bus stop on the corner, and several inexpensive Chinese restaurants close by.

I don’t know if it was the pedestal sink in the bathroom, the bright orange bedroom (with a walk-in closet) or the wood floors, but I found myself asking about the next steps in the application process.

My roommate arrived after the agent had left, and we peeked in the windows. The paint was peeling and chipped, the interior was dark, and the windows were leaking heat faster than it could be generated.

For some reason, we decided to apply to rent it.

*   *   *   *

If warning bells were ringing then, I didn’t hear them.

This was it, we were getting our little yellow house.

We signed the papers and picked up the keys. It was the week of Christmas, and my brother was in town to help me move my belongings from one home to another.

I moved my things, but planned to stay at my parents’ through the holidays.

My roommate moved in with his brand new set of early Christmas Tupperware.

*   *   *   *

I began to unpack, a little each day, setting up my bed, and hanging my clothes in the closet. I thought I was emotional from all of the transition, but as I smoothed my duvet and placed my new set of knives on the counter, I couldn’t shake the lump in my throat. I didn’t open the knife package, I couldn’t bear to put them in the sticky, hand-painted drawer.

I was nervous about going to the house alone at night. I would reach out to my roommate, first, to make sure he was there, or take my brother with me. I would put on a record, and turn on all the lights, hoping I would get used to being on my own.

But something wasn’t right.

It wasn’t long before I started getting texts from my roommate. They were low-key at first. Don’t cook anything. There might be mice. I haven’t seen any.

But things escalated quickly, as they often do.

He called our contact at the management company. She offered to bring mouse traps.

There are mice everywhere.

I called him, after that, and he told me about the nest in the stove, the droppings all over the counters. I thought about the evidence I’d seen in my closet.

Before I knew it, we were on the phone with each other, and then the property managers, trying to break the lease we had signed days earlier.

When it was done, and we were free, my almost-roommate moved back home to another city. I sat amidst the boxes in the room that had always been mine, in my parents’ house, and cried.

 *   *   *   *   *

Strickland“Moving House” was written by Cara Strickland. Cara has lived in San Diego, California, London, England, and Upland, Indiana. Once, in college, she wrote an essay saying that she was from Narnia. She currently lives in Spokane, WA, in a wonderful little house with wood floors and a purple porch, where she is a writer, blogger, editor, and food critic.

 

 

The Mourning House

Posted on by under Guest, Out of Place

I currently sleep in the guest room of my house. The other room I used to sleep in—which I have been calling the “hospice room”—is now a more hallowed space. That room was redesigned just prior to death of the woman who had accompanied me through life and parenting for 27 years. We’d only been married for just over six months, due to a five-hour period during which same-sex couples were allowed to marry in Michigan. The death was unanticipated; diagnosis of advanced breast cancer, just one year earlier, had led us to believe we had “years” instead of a year to share our lives together. Once a partner, spouse, and co-parent of two daughters, I must now try on the identity of widow, while existing inside of a house that no longer feels like home.

In the hospice room, the hospital bed is gone, but there are many artifacts put in place for healing purposes. A Buddha statue from Sri Lanka donated by sister for good luck; framed photos of orchids taken by our daughter when we went to the orchid show last year; a print of the magnificent sand hill cranes whose visits to the wetlands of Michigan we witnessed every October.

When I walk through that room I see not the space where my partner and I once slept together, did our nightly roundup of the days events, and watched our favorite television shows. Once I had listened to Nancy whisper “sleep with angels, darlin’” each night before we switched off the lights. Now, I see a kind of vacuous shrine that I don’t wish to disturb.

The hospice room is artful. Our antique mahogany bed is spread with a treasured cover from Nepal, and its geometric purple and green hues are echoed in the pillows and in the lilac paint on the walls. Nancy has left many objects containing memorabilia—cigar boxes, a pewter bowl, an old candy tin. When I am brave enough to look through them, I find weathered photos of her father and grandparents in sepia, small jewelry boxes containing antique rings and pearls, the invitation to her parents’ wedding in 1950, the baby shoes of our daughters. It contains remnants of a life I once was part of.

In the guest room where I sleep, I still feel like a visitor. The room remains the same as when it housed guests, not particularly inviting and disturbingly impersonal. The colors clash: pink curtains, a blue patterned quilt, walls painted a jolting lime green. A large unadorned bed dominates the smallish room. It’s not designed for comfort or charm. But in my current uncomfortable frame of mind, it seems to fit my requirements.

A perennial basket of unfolded laundry resides in the corner of the anonymous space where I now reside. My computer, my refuge, stands ready for my use, although I still can’t find a show I want to watch or a book I want to read. Scanning Facebook, reading through emails, I seek connections to fill the stillness that stretches before me.

The rest of the house is also still alien territory, transformed by the permanent vacancy of one of its occupants. My sprightly teenaged daughter, whose easy laughter hasn’t changed much since toddlerhood, begs me to go upstairs with her at night. She will not go back downstairs again without me, spooked by a house that is devoid of her other mother. She asks me to accompany her to the bathroom at night and in the early dark mornings. She fears that Nancy is somehow here in the house as a ghost, but perhaps not as much as she fears living in a house where Nancy no longer exists.

Nancy’s mother says she cannot bear to visit us in this place, not while the painful memories of her daughter seem to bounce off every surface of the house. But my daughter and I must live in this mourning house, trying to find our way to another kind of home where we can co-exist with what is here and what is not.

 *   *   *   *   *

JuliaGrant“The Mourning House” was written by Julia Grant. Julia lives, writes, and works in higher education in East Lansing, Michigan. She and her partner, Nancy, were one of the 300+ same-sex couples who were married on March 23, 2014, in Michigan.

The Pain and Beauty in Goodbye

Posted on by under Guest, Out of Place

Now far removed from the 9th floor Korean apartment I called home for nearly two years, I’ve been reflecting on what I’ve taken away from my time in South Korea. I’ve come up with quite a list.

I’ve learned about graciousness, and about understanding. I’ve learned patience and learned to wait for the full story before casting my final judgment- there is always a reason behind even the strangest cultural customs. It’s proven true that living in another culture has become one of my life’s great teachers.

The more I worked through lessons learned, (and trust me, there were many) there was one particular lesson that separated itself from the others; my changing understanding of the beauty and importance of saying “good-bye.”

suitcaseWhile living in foreign countries, expats make friends with natives and other foreigners alike. It’s possible, or probable, that as foreigners we will become friends with people soon to leave us, and so, we say “good-bye.”

Eventually, our time will come. Whether that time is after 30 years or 30 days, we inevitably will leave and call a new place “home.”  Maybe we’re really heading home (the place of our birth), or maybe we’re starting a new chapter filled with new scenery and with new people. No matter the situation, it all ends the same way, with us saying, “good-bye.”

I, like most people, hate good-byes. Separating oneself from those who learned and grew with you is a difficult and painful event. When we leave, we are leaving behind part of our self, and with us we take a unique mark; a mark penned by the culture that took us in.

But, since my journey back west, I’ve come to a few realizations.

Good-byes force us to start a new chapter. 

Life often will take the form of a story. We live our lives in phases, or chapters. We grow during chapter 5, we fail during chapter 7, and find hard fought redemption in chapter 14. During our story we live, breathe, love and cry. The chapters of our lives are different lengths and they are filled with a wide range of emotion.

It’s important to remember one thing, though. Like the chapters in a book, our life’s chapters never last forever. We are not defined by the mistake we made in chapter 3. What defines a person is what he chose to do with the number of chapters he or she was blessed with. Do we choose to accept what happens and allow chapter 3 to propel us  into chapter 4?

Since my time in Korea, I’m learning that “good-bye” is often the final period on that final page of whatever chapter we are currently writing. The act of saying “good-bye” lets us start again. It allows us to grow. It allows us to leave unhealthy situations in search of healthy ones, or it allows us to leave healthy situations in pursuit of a dream.

Good-byes help us to realize what we had, and to appreciate it. 

I’ve got a confession. I don’t think I ever fully appreciate people or places when they are part of my life. I take them for granted. But, as soon as I am about to leave a place, the ordinary, everyday buildings that inhabited my world (buildings that I’ve passed hundreds of times without notice) are filled with color and I find them remarkable. The people are revealed for who they are, which are friends that I am going to deeply miss and who had a lasting impression on me. I think this is human nature, though. We rarely appreciate the things right in front of us. “Good-bye,” though, forces people and places back into their proper place; their place of high honor and importance. The act of saying farewell is the great equalizer.

Good-byes help us to hope that beauty is possible again. 

The fact that saying “good-bye” is so incredibly difficult speaks to what our experiences were: beautiful and important. This pain is the living proof that we cared and that we loved. It is the frame work that defines the art that was created during our time. It’s not easy to end something of eternal importance. It’s not easy to leave friendships that altered the course of your life.

It’s important to remember that the pain, the memories, the beauty, the lessons learned all come down to this: As bad as it hurts, our act of leaving is a statement of faith (for without faith, we’d never leave) that in our act of going, there is a belief that there is more art to be created and that there is more beauty to be discovered. There is justice to be done, and lessons to be learned. There is hope to be given and there is love to be given.

“Good-bye” is a hopeful sending, and in our going, we are granted permission to go find and create again.

*   *   *   *   *

Michael“The Pain and Beauty of Goodbye” was written by Michael Palmer. Michael is a Midwest transplant residing in Northern California, a pastor, proud father of two little ones, an avid St. Louis Cardinals Fan, and a lover of cultures, travel, food, and theology. He’s published numerous articles on theology, art, and life, and is a contributor to Renovating Holiness (SacraSage Press, January 2015), a theological re-imaging of holiness. You can also find him at michaelrpalmer.com and on Twitter: @michaelrpalmer.

 (Suitcase photo by Elitatt.)

A Place to Belong

Posted on by under Guest, Out of Place

I didn’t cry when my parents dropped me off for college. And I didn’t cry when I went to sleep that night or the next day or the next. I wasn’t sad, I was just excited. I didn’t cry about leaving home because I didn’t feel like I had left home. It felt like the times I had stayed at a summer camp, or a youth rally. Even when I started going to classes and managing my own food, it still didn’t hit me that I was not home.

It took until the first Sunday that I cried. I walked across the campus and into the church that mother had gone to when she had been on the same campus years before. I walked into the unfamiliar place, and suddenly realized I had no idea where to sit. There were lots of open chairs. The problem wasn’t that there wasn’t a place for me to go; the problem was that I didn’t already have a place to belong.

Back in my home town, my family had gone to the same church my entire life. My parents still go there. I am intimately familiar with the brown brick, the blue carpet with pink and turquoise speckled into it. I know the way it smells and feels when the lights are off and you are the only one in the echoe-y narthex with the tall ceilings.

I know the history of every inch of that building, and I never had to learn it. The church building grew up with me. The seemingly random brick wall in the lobby is a weight baring wall that was the first entrance into the church. The fellowship hall used to be the sanctuary, and for years the floors weren’t carpeted and the congregation would move the chairs to the side after the service and have a square dance or a dinner or anything really because the floors were so easily cleaned.

I played tag through the walls that were not yet dry walled, and picked up weird looking nails as treasures when they built the education wing. The original members had wanted a new sanctuary, but put it off because they saw the necessity of the immediate future. The nursery had been overflowing for quite some time. The original nursery is now the kitchen, the education wing has tripled in size, and the congregation finally did get that beautiful new sanctuary they were promised. I was singing in the choir next to my mom the first day it was used.

Throughout all of these changes, my family had always sat two or three rows in from the front, stage left. There were no official rules or seating, but that is where we always were. Perhaps this was because my mom was more often than not in the choir loft and she could give us “the look” from there if she needed to. I just knew that roughly three rows in, stage left, was where I belonged.

When, at eighteen years old, I walked into that unfamiliar church and did not know where I was supposed to sit in the sanctuary, suddenly I realized that I was not home. I did not have a place that I belonged in this building, in this sanctuary, in this church body. I sat down stage right, still sort of near the front, and I cried throughout the entire service. I never went back. It just didn’t feel like home.

It is hard to sit in a place when you are not sure where you belong.

*   *   *   *   *

Abby“A Place to Belong” was written by Abby Norman. Abby lives and loves in the city of Atlanta. She swears a lot more than you would think for a public school teacher and mother of two under three. She can’t help that she loves all words. She believes in champagne for celebrating everyday life, laughing until her stomach hurts and telling the truth, even when it is hard, maybe especially then. You can find her blogging at Accidental Devotional and tweeting at @accidentaldevo. Abby loves all kinds of Girl Scout cookies and literally burning lies in her backyard fire pit.

 

Enough

Posted on by under Food & Place, Guest

I was a recent divorcee, and we were traveling to meet the family of the man with whom I was “the other woman.” Everyone had been gracious from afar, but I knew that his mom had been on the other side of infidelity and I worried that grace might be a little frosty in person. Perhaps there was forgiveness for the son, but not for the home wrecker girlfriend.

In the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving, I kept pestering Rich, asking what we could take to dinner. I was nervous about making a good impression. I knew that his mom was accomplished in the kitchen, while I was coming from a season of limited cooking. In my first marriage, I had all but given up preparing home-cooked meals, relying instead on prepackaged food to feed my family. With Rich’s encouragement, I was beginning to stretch my culinary wings a bit, but preparing anything for his mom, my eventual mother-in-law, felt like a test that I was destined to fail.

00781 (1)We finally decided that we would take bread and salad. We made two loaves of bread, made some compound butters, and bought the ingredients for a Caprese salad with a balsamic reduction. I knew it wasn’t enough. In light of a turkey and mashed potatoes and homemade cheesecake, what were a couple loaves of bread and some mozzarella, tomato, and basil leaves? It wouldn’t be enough.

I wouldn’t be enough.

The truth was, I wanted to take something that might cover my inadequacies as a cook, but also as a potential wife, as a mother. Something to prove that I was more than an adulteress. It was my first major holiday apart from my children, the first Thanksgiving in years that I wasn’t spending with my parents, and I longed to be accepted as a part of this family—to have a place in this home during a season when I felt displaced in so many areas.

As mealtime approached, my nerves increased. Rich’s brother and sister-in-law had welcomed me to their brand-new home warmly, even if the heater wasn’t working properly. But I was still waiting to meet the woman who had given birth to the man whose hand I was currently clutching. Our meager offerings to the Thanksgiving feast looked as small as I felt.

We heard the Jeep pull up the driveway and I could feel my heartbeat quicken. We should take the bread and go. Go before she had a chance to look at me and disapprove.

She came through the door, and her sons went to give her a hug. I stayed back to give them an opportunity to say hello, then she made her way over to me.

And she embraced me.

The rest of the day, we sat in the kitchen, cutting up potatoes together, tasting the balsamic reduction that Rich made, laughing, telling stories. I had a piece of her cheesecake, she had a piece of our bread.

Everything was delicious. Everything was enough.

 *  *  *  *  *

424033_10151308414006236_662319879_n (1)“Enough” was written by Alise Chaffins. Alise is a wife, a mother, an eater of soup, and a lover of Oxford commas. You can generally find her sitting behind a keyboard of some kind: playing or teaching the piano, writing at her laptop, or texting her friends a random movie quote. She lives in West Virginia and blogs at knittingsoul.com

 

On mornings, intention, and getting still enough

Posted on by under Food & Place, Guest

I’m no purist. As soon as the temperature dips below 90—usually mid-October in this part of Texas—I start pouring eggnog into my coffee. This may be one of few truly habitual morning routines I have. By design, I resist routine in the mornings. I have never been the sort of person that wakes the same time, has the same breakfast, has the same commute. I don’t find this to be noble. I have tried with limited success to become that sort of disciplined person, anchored in morning ritual and liturgy of coffee cup and toast point and made bed. I manage for a few days, at most, and then the resolve slips away from me and I’m back to a disordered sense of morning duty, careening from grocer to writing to recycle bin to conference call.

But eggnog in the coffee cup, that point in October when it becomes justified, slows me down just enough. I catch myself getting still, hearing my breath, the way the brick of the apartment whistles when wind cuts across it, the feel of the cement beneath bare feet. I sit across from the windows that keep watch with the sunrise and pull out the notebook, forgotten too often during the late season of summer, where pen is set to craft recipe, reason out flavor, and I plan a menu for the week. I get still enough to be mindful, yet again, of Alexander Schmemann’s speculation that no matter how utilitarian we have managed to make everything else, food remains something sacred to us, something that cannot be pure utility. There is reverence in the wielded knife and the butchered lamb, a kind of sacrament of patience in the warm of the midday loaf set on the windowsill to rise.

unnamedEggnog in the coffee cup returns me to this practice of noticing, attending to the detailed work of craft. I am no hater of technology, no scorner of social media, but in the brevity of the early morning pause, the breviary of an ordinary life, I disconnect just long enough to be mindful. Mindfulness is an underrated virtue. It doesn’t boast a great deal of acclaim. But mindfulness keeps us observant of ourselves and of the spaces we inhabit, keeps us intentional and keeps us kind. When I pause long enough to be careful, I am reminded of the miracle that it is to live, to taste, to smell, to make. We are alchemists of invitation and acceptance in our kitchens. We present common sacrament upon our tables. We offer chairs as signs of worth. We prepare tables as icons of welcome.

All this from eggnog in the coffee cup. Just enough of a pause in the waking hour, when the sun first colors the skyline, to remember the good work of being present, being focused, being exactly where I am. This is a ritual I can return to, when all else about routine fails. Clasped coffee cup tinged with sweetness, this takes me back to the center, to the contentment of the very moment.

*   *   *   *   *

Yancey.Headshot-5“On mornings, intention, and getting still enough” was written by Preston Yancey. Preston is an Anglican priest-in-training, an author, sometimes-painter, sometimes-baker, sometimes-scholar interested in Christian theology and the arts. He wrote Tables in the Wilderness, a book about God and silence, and lives with his wife, Hilary, in Waco, Texas.

The Price of Avocados

Posted on by under Food & Place, Guest

It is large and green and looks so inviting. I imagine it mashed in a bowl with a jalapeño, a hint of tomato, some spices. But I can’t do it. I can’t spend $2.99 for an avocado, not even an organic one. I walk out of the store with my bag of kale and wine, avocado still on the grocery list in my mind.

One birthday, when I was in my teens, I asked my aunt to send me some avocados from her tree in Southern California, where I spent my first seven years. The box winged it’s way through two states and arrived at my Washington State door in February. Her avocados were different than the ones I could buy at the store, they weren’t as bumpy, or as small. All too soon, they were gone.

At least once a week, when I was growing up, we had tacos. My mom would pour a generous helping of oil into a skillet and fry our tortillas until they were crispy. Sometimes, we would fill them with equally crispy fish, cut into small pieces, coated in flour and sizzled in a neighboring pan. Other days, she would brown ground beef or turkey while I grated cheese and sometimes tore lettuce.

We would put all of the ingredients into the sections of a plastic tray. It was our taco tray, and I never thought to question whether it could have another purpose. Each member of my family would pile their shell high with the filling of their choice. I always made sure to add a generous dollop, or two, of guacamole.

When we had guests for dinner, after we moved to Washington, there was often a conversation about the way we served our tacos. In the Pacific Northwest, I learned, most people purchase pre-formed “taco shells” which seemed much more like large, curved tortilla chips to me. For the very brave, tacos were made with cold, soft tortillas. I was a polite child, and I ate these foreign foods without complaint when at friend’s houses, invited to stay for dinner.

When I went away to college in central Indiana, I was thrilled to be paired with a roommate from Texas. She will understand, I thought. We will pursue authentic Mexican food together.

Her uncle, a professor at our university, invited us for lunch some Sundays. On one such occasion, my roommate made guacamole. I watched, with mounting horror, as she added spoonfuls of Miracle Whip and stirred it in.

We were saying the same words, but we did not mean the same thing. It has taken me a long time to try Tex-Mex again.

On my visits to San Diego, my birthplace, I often see avocado trees from the window of our rental car. These trips are filled with family, driving, and the beach. Still, no matter how long I’m there, I always venture to Old Town, to a little place we used to go when I was small. I pause to watch the women in the window, making tortillas by hand as fast as they can. The perfect distraction, while waiting to be seated at the busy part of the day.

When my brother and I were little, my parents would order two Tostada Supremas and fresh flour tortillas. We would all make tacos out of these plates, which seemed monstrously big to my little eyes.

Now, when I go, I order a Tostada Suprema all my own, with extra guacamole, and a margarita. Somehow, I usually manage to finish the plate (though I have carried leftovers with me on the plane, inspiring jealousy in my fellow passengers).

Periodically, I buy some oil, tortillas and ground beef. I’ve been waiting for the price of avocados to go down, but they never seem to fall very far. I compare the small green fruit to a coffee, measuring it against any other indulgence, and it usually makes it’s way into my basket.

3665955683_a630020fcf_zI fold a paper towel and put it on a plate, ready to catch the excess oil from the golden brown tortilla, waiting to be filled.

I cut the avocado in half and draw parallel lines with my paring knife, just as my mother used to, scooping the resulting little squares into a bowl with a spoon. Always, I sigh with relief when the inside is green and a little firm. There is nothing like the disappointment of an avocado too ripe to eat.

I don’t belong in the land of my birth any more than I belong in the mountains and valleys of the Northwest. My roots don’t lead to any one place of belonging, but to many. Still, when I take a bite and close my eyes, I taste the peace of that which is familiar and much-loved, and I’m glad that I splurged on the avocado after all.

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cara profile“The Price of Avocados” was written by Cara Strickland. Cara has lived in San Diego, California, London, England, and Upland, Indiana. Once, in college, she wrote an essay saying that she was from Narnia. She currently lives in Spokane, WA, where she is a writer, blogger, editor, and food critic. She almost always finds a way to write about food. Cara blogs at “Little Did She Know” and can be found on Twitter @littledidcknow.

(Avocado photo curtesy of HarmonyRae.)