October

Here’s something new and good. It’s October 1. A perfectly good time to fill your inbox or internet browser window with some good stuff. Here the maple leaves are final orange and red, the remaining garden flowers are about to give up the ghost, and I’m still harvesting carrots, gourds, and beans from the last few green patches. Two ravens perch in the dying locust tree behind our house, the farmer has hayed his field for the last time, and soup makes a royal and regular return to our menu.

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Here’s what songs are on repeat:

Recipes That Will 100% Hit Our Table This Month:

• Peasant Bread

• Concord Grape Jam

• Roasted Butternut Squash and Spinach Lasagna

A Poem I Force My Children to Listen to:

Come, Little Leaves

by George Cooper (this poem is in the public domain)

" Come, little leaves, " said the wind one day,
" Come o'er the meadows with me and play;
Put on your dresses of red and gold,
For summer is gone and the days grow cold. "

Soon as the leaves heard the wind's loud call,
Down they came fluttering, one and all;
Over the brown fields they danced and flew,
Singing the glad little songs they knew.

" Cricket, good-by, we've been friends so long,
Little brook, sing us your farewell song;
Say you are sorry to see us go;
Ah, you will miss us, right well we know.

" Dear little lambs in your fleecy fold,
Mother will keep you from harm and cold;
Fondly we watched you in vale and glade,
Say, will you dream of our loving shade? "

Dancing and whirling, the little leaves went,
Winter had called them, and they were content;
Soon, fast asleep in their earthy beds,
The snow laid a coverlid over their heads.

A Poem I Love:

The Love of October - W. S. Merwin

A child looking at ruins grows younger
but cold
and wants to wake to a new name
I have been younger in October
than in all the months of spring
walnut and may leaves the color
of shoulders at the end of summer
a month that has been to the mountain
and become light there
the long grass lies pointing uphill
even in death for a reason
that none of us knows
and the wren laughs in the early shade now
come again shining glance in your good time
naked air late morning
my love is for lightness
of touch foot feather
the day is yet one more yellow leaf
and without turning I kiss the light
by an old well on the last of the month
gathering wild rose hips
in the sun.

What We’re Doing in the Garden:

• Harvesting the fall garden - carrots, greens, beans, sweet potatoes, green tomatoes, gourds, remaining pumpkins, and seed collecting, of course!

• Getting ready to plant garlic and shallots at the end of the month! I usually aim to plant between Halloween and Thanksgiving.

• And Why We Won’t Be Cleaning Up the Garden Until Spring
  

From this Quiet Place

Here I am, blowing the dust off of this website, seeing as how the last post I made here was in October 2020. A year of thoughts, writings, painting, poetry, parenting, marriage, beautiful memories, late-night tears, off-screen work, and real-life digging has found me a year later on this website with something new spinning in my mind.

I want to try something new. I hope you’ll have grace with me as I figure out how this will work but I’m a bundle of ideas, and I am not one to take my time jumping into inspiration.

I’ve continued to write and most of it has ended up as lengthy Instagram captions, run-on sentences in a Google Doc, or it’s buried in the tanned pages of my journal. I’ve spent the better part of the last two years stretching my time, my energy, my skills, my ideas. I’ve found my arms full of words, poetry, gardens, vintage items, watercolors, recipes, chicken feathers, and maybe even my thin sanity at times. 

For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to create and think and dream, and I’ve wanted to find a way to share all of that. And I think I have the early simmering of how I want to bring that to you.

When Jed and I moved into this house only 4 years ago, we started gutting the interior, spackling up old cracked walls, tilling the fallow ground, and we began making this 120 year old farmhouse a home. We live in lake country, which means it’s incredibly flat. For two kids who grew up in the shadow of the mountains, (Jed in the Green Mountains of Vermont, and me somewhere between the Catskills and the Adirondacks), we sorely miss the rise of the horizon in every direction. But this little old farmhouse is on a tiny little hill just outside of the city. It’s just high enough to get longer sunsets, a slight view, and wild whipping winds in February. 

Not longer after we moved in, I hung a quote from Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” on our kitchen wall. 

“His house was house was perfect whether you liked food, or sleep, or work, or story-telling, or singing, or just sitting and thinking best, or a pleasant mixture of them all. Evil things did not come into that valley."

We named this little two-acre plot “Cnoc Tearmann” (pronounced knock tear-mon) which means (in Irish) “Sanctuary Hill.” We wanted our home to feel safe. To be a haven of beauty and grace and truth. To cultivate life and all of the good things the Lord has given us. We want it to be a home where the Gospel thrives, not just for our family, but for anyone who sits with us in the messy in-between of construction projects, raising kids, and living life. We want it to be a place where when anyone stepped inside here or brushed shoulders with this place, they’d breathe a good and easy sigh, and feel that “evil things do not come into that valley.” 

So this has become our moniker and my hope as I continue to write and create. I opened an Etsy shop under this name and for awhile we were tracking our house renovations under this name. 

I thought I’d start to share some of this work “food, or sleep, or work, or story-telling, or singing, or just sitting and thinking best, or a pleasant mixture of them all” with you.

Here’s my hope —

Every month, I’ll share poetry, some that I’ve written and some that I love. 

Recipes that hit our table frequently enough that I no longer need to look at them.

Writers who find their way to our hearts. 

Paintings I create. Garden seeds, tips, and ideas. 

Ramblings and questions and friends who I love.

Discount codes and sneak peeks to the Etsy shop, vintage items, things I create, and the things my family builds.

And continued, as usual, the raw feelings I have about how much I love Jesus, the gospel, the work of digging in to the ground we’re planted in. 

I want to do this well, so I won’t promise you a weekly post. But I do promise that every time I sit to write, post, or share, it will be from this grove the Lord has given us. And as long as I have breath in my lungs, I want you to feel at peace here just as if you were coming to my house for dinner, and to know that an extension of my home is this little corner of the internet. While the world thrashes and rages, and some dig bunkers and stack their shelves for the apocalypse, I’ll try to keep sharing the good good things from this little knoll. This little viewpoint. This little sanctuary hill.

On Autumn, Anxiety, and the World

I have my hands full of love-in-a-puff seed pods. They’re magical little lanterns, once green and now brown, filled with three or four seeds with tiny white hearts on them. I can only assume that’s why they’re called love-in-a-puff. It doesn’t really matter right now, as I’m creating the first path of the day through the morning dew from the garden. The sun isn’t yet above the tree line. Its golden rays are hitting the leaves just right. Yellow, red, rust, auburn. They’re all chattering a bit in the branches above me. The chickens are skittering around in the garden, freshly fed, a new morning, no agenda but to eat and lay. A large, lumbering flatbed semi-truck barrels by with crates and crates nearly overflowing with orange pumpkins. Headed to the city, I’m sure. To the grocery stores, the pop-up pumpkin patches, the markets that supply the front porch and jack o'lantern decor. A wedge of geese fly overhead, the typical V-formation is a gray silhouette against the early morning sky. They’re honking their way directly...southwest. Yes. That’s the way, I mumble to myself.

I know the world feels like it’s in upheaval right now. I know, in both private and public ways, how we all feel sideways, waiting for the waves to set us back upright again. I feel this as I walk toward the house, whispering to myself as the day begins.

It’s the dishes, that’s what I initially thought. If I can stay on top of washing all of the dishes, wistfully hoping that one day we’ll have a dishwasher, then maybe I’ll feel better.

But then it was the laundry. Every day, new load in, out, folded, away. 
No it was the meal planning. Now three full meals for everyone, every day of the week.
It was the garden. Once fall comes, it will slow down, I thought.
No the dog hair that seems to reappear in the corners by the hour.
The e-mails.
The text messages.
The zoom calls.
Not enough sleep.
The budget.
The lack of childcare.
My husband’s increased workload.
The barn that needs repair.
The car that broke down.
The school curriculum.
Homeschooling.
The new schedule.
The overwhelming sense of personal failure.
The friend’s marriage falling apart.
The bad news.
The friends who we don’t see anymore. 
The bad prognosis.
The friends who are no longer with us. 
Election season.
Covid spikes and warnings.
Red zones.
Racial tensions.
News headlines.
Social media.

It’s all of it. 

And so this morning, like every morning lately, on the short walk to and from the chicken house, with the morning dew and early sun, I throw my heart into the arms of Christ. 

It’s you. That’s it.

This is what I repeat at night when the sun sets, the children settle into bed, the darkness lays onto the ground. Into the arms of Christ I send my heart running. You’re it. I have all my eggs in this basket. I’m banking on you. To whom else shall we go? What else do we have? What other hope can we anchor ourselves to? Nothing, no one. I have no back-up plan. No other answers. No better arguments. I don’t know enough to know how to wax poetic about politics, policies, or all that’s happening in our world.

The older I get, the more I realize that all of life passes like sand through my hands. I am seeing more and more that just getting to Heaven isn’t the goal; knowing and beholding Christ is. Only Jesus, who spoke Creation into order, who gave life to light and who laid down in the darkness, only to rise again, is unchanging, unshifting. He brings no wringing hands, no anxiety, no questions. Only Jesus, that’s it. I think these are the words that will be my repetitious anthem throughout the rest of my life. As I realize the question in John 6:68 “Lord, to whom shall we go?” isn’t said in sarcasm but in resolute desperation. Lord, we have nowhere else.

So I’m watching the geese, watching the world pass, watching the sand trickle through my hands. I’m doing no extraordinary things and I only know the prayers that bring my heavy feet, one foot in front of the other, to and from the house each morning. I have my hands full of love-in-a-puff seed pods. Small seeds marked with love, in the grip of the gardener, heading into winter in capable hands.