Here is another day; a ribbon of blue sky. Six doves pass above my office window. My neighbor's Japanese maple, adolescent in pink, lilacs only a mist of purple, forsythia waning.

A frost caught the newly leafing butterfly bushes and turned them to twisted, dead things. This morning as I cut red tulips and rather tattered daffodils for Sally's mother, who is in the hospital, Sally noted the bushes and said, "Well, they'll survive, but they'll probably be a bit bare where the frost got them, a little less lush than they usually are."

I feel that this is true of our little community now; one frost or another has seized all of us in surprising ways these last nine months. We lost a dear friend, (mother and wife) Nancy; two of us lost our jobs; we've dealt with sickness and uncertainty; another family mourns another dear friend, and now Sally's beloved mother is in the hospital. We're all a bit barer on the outside, stripped to vulnerability even in this wonderful spring.

I hope. I believe. I trust. Such overused words, and so hard to say with my soul. The trend in literature right now--fiction and poetry--is to hide these words, to replace them with perfectly wrought cleverness. Smart and clipped, sarcastic and a little bitter, apparently offhand but squeezed and skinned to a certain ugliness that leaves us all bereft. Sincerity is out. We have become so afraid of sentimentality (and we should abhor it) that we have lost the ability to bear goodness.

But sentimentality is word without flesh or joy or pain, without all that comes with being human: un-incarnated words. We pull it over us when we have lost our courage to articulate. I look for Believe in Nancy's garden, in her roses that have become lithe and green again, that remind me that death is not ending. I watch Sally drive off to see her mother yet again in the hospital, her car cluttered with tea cups and knitting and flowers, and I find Hope. I touch the faces of my children, watch them in sleep, and I see Trust. Words dwell in the bodies and blood of all I love; I collect them, I hold them, they are bird calls and color, they are new every morning.

Here is goodness: sitting on the floor next to Sally this morning, watching our children. Tulip leaves pearled with early morning rain. A hot cup of tea. Toast with jam. The love of a community, strong overlapping webs of meals and words and presence. All the things that current under us, that deepen us, that help us say the words that seem sentimental and facile to others. I hope; I believe; I trust. One hundred thanks that spill from my cup, even in a morning of frost. What was it that John, Nancy's husband, said to me as we stood broken over Nancy's grave? He looked at me with eyes struck through by pain. Behind him, tall-shouldered pines darkened in first nightfall. "We are waiting for the eternal spring," he told me. There were low mountains around us, the leaves of winter at our feet. We stood over the grave mound and the sound of Nancy's daughter's sobbing filled us. We are looking for eternal spring. Let it come. Let us see it.

These moments, sun and tightly budded lilacs, the peach tree blossom waxing to new leaf, crabapple flowers and white-tipped bird wings, these moments I am filled. Roar of the heater, running water, song of chickadee and sparrow.

Ooof. A flesh-colored spider just scrambled over the screen of my netbook, reminding me I am not alone. A black fly, iridescent wings, a woman walking by the house, arm extended, pulled by a dog I can't see. I am never quite alone, and I like it that way--flash of light on passing car, windows of houses, the fly, bulwarked by screen, buzzing in protest. Silence pregnant with the small sounds of a thousand lives if I listen closely enough, the creak of floorboard, the shadows of birds.

This morning Martin and I sat in the sun room and read from Phyllis Tickle's Divine Hours. Whether you are religious or not, new traditions unfolding in spring are wonderful, and this is one of ours. We read ancient prayers that seem as if they are being spoken to us newly, written and sung by people vulnerable to injustice, some of whom were fleeing for their lives. While Martin and I are certainly not in such desperate straits, we feel freshly acquainted with injustice. So often we have been protected from these things with wall upon wall of privilege and safety so that a month ago, when our lives stretched out simply and easily before us, these prayers would have seemed flatter and less interesting. But now they are springtime for us.

Today, like millions of people the world round, Martin and I prayed for our daily bread. As Martin reflected afterward, we weren't asking for weekly bread, a couple of extra loaves in the freezer or a whole storehouse just in case. Just enough for today. Enough to fill us. And then tomorrow we'll ask for more. What is the poem I love? Everyone who thirsts, come to the waters, and you who have no money, come buy, and eat.

This is the sort of morning that fits me like a glove: cool, overcast, perfect for short-sleeve weeding. It's a Nairobi morning, and in my garden this morning, birdsong with black dirt under my fingernails and worm-squirm and distant laughter of children, I could almost smell bread baking at Adam's Arcade.

Adam's Arcade was a short walk away from our first home in Nairobi. We lived in the second-story flat of a large house belonging to an older couple who were on home-leave in the US. Since it would take almost a year for our shipment to arrive from America (due to extensive testing of my mother's dangerous bottle of McCormick Poppyseeds), the flat with its lovely old furniture, dusty puzzles, and enormous, screenless windows was perfect. An elderly British woman lived downstairs in a flowery apartment and she and my mother took tea on a regular basis. There was a large, sunny courtyard where I once took a sketchbook and toiled with my pencils over a sketch of a bicycle wheel. There was a pool but I never remember swimming in it, and there must have been a high gate with a night guard sitting in a little hut.

That was the house in the spreading trees where my mother caught a baboon on our dining room table, eating calmly from the fruit bowl. Baboons are not trustworthy, polite creatures and my mother chased his rubbery bottom all the way down the hallway and back out the window.

Nairobi was younger then. Friends tell me that it takes an hour or more just to drive across the city now. I haven't been back in fifteen years but my memories are as clear as if I left just a month ago. Mostly I remember colors and smells, the sound of my own voice as I opened a window, struck by the beauty of the city--thorny trees, bougainvillea climbing over thick hedges, the jangle of music and the distant roar of downtown traffic. I suppose it was dusty and loud and rather unsafe (almost everyone we knew had been robbed in one way or another), but it was the place of my childhood, and beyond that, it was objectively beautiful in many ways. Why is our culture so monochromatic? In Nairobi, color, color everywhere, on tin cups and matatus and clothes and up walls and in the market.

But today I'm thinking of Adam's Arcade, which we loved for its awkward concrete playground and difficult slide only manageable by squatting and sliding on the soles of your shoes. The bakery smelled different than any bakery I've sniffed since; it was a warm mixture, I suppose, of french bread and samosas and mandazi, mingling with the dust and exhaust of Nairobi. I don't remember many of its offerings beyond the chocolate croissants, which my mother asked for in a French accent since our Canadian friend, who worked for the embassy or the consulate or something important, had once mocked us for sounding American and uncouth. "A loaf of bread and three cwaasant," we ordered, and that's how we still pronounce them today, much to the vigorous mockery of Americans (like my husband), who chide us for being ridiculous.

Today the morning is a grey umbrella, and the air swims with birdsong and spring and the voices of my children on the porch. And I too, just for a few minutes, am a child, lifting my nose to find a rather mediocre bakery I once loved and anticipated as a world-class treat. Sometimes, just before sleeping, I find a place like that deep inside, and I long to stay in that cool place above worry and adulthood just long enough to slip into a dream, and soemtimes, if I'm lucky, I do.

*
For a vision of loveliness, as my mother says, see my friend Sal's photos (plus I got a little mention :) at her blog: Sally's Blog

It doesn't feel like March.

70 to 80 degree weather, warm nights, and our world is gaudy with color--crabapples the color of pink lemonade, Bradford pears in lacy pompoms, magnolias opening their saucer blooms to a robin's egg sky, bedecked daffodils (Happy late Daffodil Day, by the way), and the forsythia going absolutely lemon-wild. Some of you will remember that I thought "Forsythia" would be a gorgeous middle name for Bea, who was born almost at this time four years ago, but she took "Fern" instead, much more sensible but not as fraptious.

I do love forsythia, even though they are only truly glorious for a week. I don't understand why people dismiss something because its beauty is short-lived; you'd have to pooh-pooh the butterfly, and that's just the beginning.

I can only think that we as middle-class consumers look for the most enduring bang for our buck, so to plant a row of forsythia, which can grow quite gangly and only blooms yellow for about 1/52.18 of the year, seems like a meaningless extravagance.

And I suppose too, that in the same attitude of economy, you could dismiss a whole cornucopia of magnificence, but as Babette's Feast or simply being in love teaches us, we often find grace only when we allow ourselves to embrace extravagance.

I remember someone telling me once that they found themselves holding back active friendship from a dying person, because of the energy expenditure and the output of love that would only end in loss. It's a cliche--"'tis better to have loved. . ." but it's true that it's always better to exhaust myself loving well, though it opens me to pain.

It would be easy to take what has happened to us in the past three weeks--a horrible, dark thing of injustice--and throw it over our last seven years here. But that would be like throwing a cloak over our garden, snuffing out every lovely flower blossom, sorrowing over the whole thing because the end was disappointing. I refuse to do it. As I told an about-to-graduate student the other day, we won't let this ruin things for us; we'll celebrate every good thing that has happened and leave knowing that this was, indeed, a good place, where we came to love better and where we were loved well.

At the grocery store today, waiting at the deli, I chatted with a woman who, like many people I've talked with lately, shook her head warily over the amazing days we've been having, warning that it will only end badly with a freak snow storm or a summer of swarmy mosquitoes. It's beautiful now, sure, but in a couple months? Pestilence!

Meanwhile? Meanwhile, I'm enjoying every minute, gobbling this feast of beauty while it lasts, and I won't stop until I have to.

It's Sunday and the children are a'bed. Last night, a good friend of ours (and a colleague of Martin's), wonderful poet and wise fellow Bob Randolph (his wife, Amy, is also a lovely poet and songwriter with whom we have sung many a time), sent us this e-mail after we potlucked with some good friends on Saturday evening. . .Thought I'd share it with you.

*

Hi Martin and Kim,

Amy told me that at Noah's house the other night, when Amy was there, Martin told about writing a poem and reading it to Kim as she stood working with something on the stove, her back to him. He said he finished reading and there was no response, so he asked what she thought of it. She turned around with tears in her eyes because the poem was beautiful.

Amy said that at that point, when she heard Martin recount that, she said to herself, "Ah, yes--they'll be ok."

I agree and want to amplify that a little. Tenure or no tenure, as important as that may be, is not the core, neither is promotion or not promotion, and where a person works or doesn't work isn't the core either--Stevens sold insurance, Ginsberg got kicked out of college, Snyder sailed around all over as a merchant seaman--writers write; to a writer what can matter more than writing something so beautiful it brings tears to your soul-mate. That's what we do. That's what we build our universes out of. The rest is stuff, but that's the heart of it.

So I'm with Amy on this.
The two of you standing by that stove may not be much to some people, but to me, Martin, it's exactly why you should be hired at Harvard, or anywhere else.

(At least, that's the sort of thing the universe I bank on comes from.)

In the midst of talk of . . ., talk of abiding sorrow, a man reads a poem to his wife in the kitchen as she is cooking, and the poem is so beautiful it makes her cry. That's the diamond and the truth.

Bob

When I came in late from eating pie (Happy Pi Day!) with some good women tonight, I ran upstairs to say goodnight to the restless girls and noticed Beatrix's neck was sunburned. I hate to celebrate a sunburn, but it is a the mark of one unbelievably gorgeous, summery day, with the daffodils waving like gospel singers and the grass busting out so green it's almost bad taste and the robins taking back the neighborhood. It was THAT sort of March day, the kind of day that makes you want to forget all your troubles and fly off into the lonely white cloud in the azure sky.

Though I did not fly, I did walk quite a bit and sat in the sun and continued with the forever job of tidying the winter-weary yard. I pulled on Martin's thick hide gloves and went at the piles of nasty thorns, trying to wrestle them into big garbage bags (a tricky task). Soon after the buses pulled through the the streets, Roberto, Nancy's middle son, arrived in our driveway on his bike. Roberto, middle-school, big-talker, sweetly handsome young man (originally from Guatemala, with a sweep of dark hair, big, brown eyes, a bit shorter than many of his peers), is a good story-teller and is extraordinarily skilled with wee kids. And my two little girls love him. They've both grown up with him, calling him either "Berto" or "Bobo." One night two-year old Bea prayed for "Uncle Berto," which Merry and Catherine thought was hilarious. Elspeth and Bea love to torture him in a good-natured way, pulling on his legs and slugging him once and a while (this is not encouraged by their mother, by the way.)

This afternoon he somewhat awkwardly hung out with me for a few minutes while I shoved rose branches into a trashcan. He responded politely to my stock questions--How was school today? Do you have testing this week? That means no homework, right? Etc. (How boring I must be, just like the grown-ups I remember from my childhood; I'd answer with a smile, wishing they would ask about something other than school. . .and mostly they never did). After a genial interlude, Roberto disappeared down the hill and the next thing I knew, he was hitting around a plastic baseball with Elspeth. I looked up again and he was pitching to her, slowly and patiently. And then Elspeth gathered some black walnuts from our big tree and began throwing them to Roberto, who knocked them to kingdom come, down our chimney and off our roof.

"Home run!" I heard Elspeth yell, and then to me up the hill, "Mommy! Roberto's GOOD!"

I gazed down at them in the sea of emerald grass, six-year old Elspeth (often a handful) and Roberto (often discouraged by his lack of ease with sports), both middle children, and they seemed to be glowing like suns. I could feel the warmth.

John, Roberto's father, had told me a few days ago that Roberto had come home from playing baseball at a friend's house discouraged and in a bad mood. Today Roberto admitted to me he can't hit a baseball. But he could sure hit those walnuts Elspeth was pitching to him--boy, was he slugging them. And to Elspeth down in the field by our creek, Roberto was Babe Ruth.

It struck me: we all should be so adored. Adoration is wonderful. When we know it from another person we love, adoration transforms us, helps us come closer to understanding who we really are--worthy of celebration. And when we see it in the pure, loving adoration of another, and it moves us to strive to be more generous givers.

"Well, I think I'll just come back tomorrow," Roberto told me a few hours later, after he had hung out in the garden, eating graham crackers distributed by Beatrix, who warned him "not to get a tummyache" and then on the porch with Elspeth as she cut out a paper crown.

"That would be wonderful," I smiled. "You're really good with the kids, Roberto."

He shrugged a little. "It seems like you could use someone to play with them," he said. And as he inched toward the door, he added, "I'll just come over after school."

"You can come over any time," I said.

"I told Elspeth I'd bring my aluminum bat."

I remember what my dear childhood friend told me when she fell in love with the man she will marry this summer. Her eyes were full of a new place, as if she'd just travelled to the most beautiful country she had never known existed. "It feels so good to be loved like that," she said. "I didn't know how good it would be."

We all deserve to be adored, not in a sentimental silly way that clouds our faults and coats us with sugar, but in a real way, a way that strips off our veils and shows us who we really are, and we realize that we are, after all, worthy of being loved sacrificially. Perhaps the adoration that I silently celebrated this afternoon is a glimpse of the eternal, where we will be at last truly joyful without reservation, where we will love without having to draw back, where we will accept the love that has always been waiting for us, that has surrounded us from our birth.

This is a reflection I wrote for our Mennonite church about giving, and, by jove, it seemed so appropriate I thought I'd paste it here.


Right away I think of this story: my first truly sacrificial gift, and how it was given in ignorance that ripened into bitter regret.

I was about six, old enough to know how rare and wonderful a silver dollar was. My granddad gave these gleaming discs to us on our birthdays, and they were precious things. My sister never spent hers’, and I once bribed her out of one, but that’s a different story.

We were at our grandparent’s church—a place of plush carpet and gleaming wooden pews softened by long red cushions. When the offering was taken, I fumbled in my pockets for a quarter—then, as now, I felt a compunction to place something in the offering, even if it was from a panicky impulse not to be embarrassed in front of the solemn offering men in their suits, looking like Mafia envoys. As the velvet plum-colored pouch, split in half by slick walnut handles, passed me, I slipped in a quarter—a small offering, perhaps, even for a child like me who received allowances, but enough to get by, I thought, much better than a dime, say, or a handful of pennies, pathetic as they slide from the palm. In any case, I’d be guilt-free at least until communion, when my mother would cry and I’d struggle to come up with a list of sins to confess silently to God so I’d not drink unbearable punishment on myself. At least offering was over with.

But my sister passed the pouch to my father, as it disappeared out of reach down the aisle, I realized what I had done. Oh, no! My silver dollar. Given to me by the warm, old hands of my grey-haired grandfather. Given to me in love and in trust. I’d put it in a pouch with other meaningless coins, and it would be counted and dropped into the church coffers by more men in suits. Nobody would know how precious it was to me—nobody.

I pulled my mother’s ear down to my mouth and whispered, “I gave away my silver dollar. Into the offering!”

She sensed the desperation in my voice, I knew it. Would she help me retrieve it? God didn’t care what denominations the money came in, after all! Couldn’t I just give four quarters, the same amount of money but not the monumental treasure that my Granddad’s silver dollar was? I only got one once a year, and not even that often, since we lived overseas. Granddaddy had to go to the bank especially and exchange regular paper money for the silver dollars he’d place in his grandkid’s palm. Surely God would understand that this gift was too precious?

My mother leaned over in the church-way she had, where she could whisper in our ear without moving her eyes from the front of the church. “Never regret giving anything to God,” my mother whispered back.

What? Why did parents never understand?

I spent the rest of church—the scripture readings, the long sermon, right through the last hymn—in agony over my loss. I pictured how it had happened over and over again. I’d felt in my pockets, yanked out a silver coin, and tossed it in the offering pouch. I saw it disappear down the aisle again and again, and I thought about what my mother had said—never regret, never regret, never regret.

I still think about this moment. I don’t know if the loss of my silver dollar, which was of utmost significance to me at six, was a defining moment in my life, but the memory still defines me today, when I struggle to give away what’s precious. The giving, done in a moment of spirited generosity, perhaps, is not as hard as the trusting—the trusting that the one to whom I give can appreciate the gift enough, will be careful with what I have given—my money, my time, my children, my love.

God will take it all—and in my clearer moments, I realize it was never mine in the first place. I realize that there is no such thing as possession in the Great Story—that all things are entrusted, but not given away for keeps. God is not trustworthy in the way I want God to be. I want to receive a gift and hunker down in my favorite chair, savoring it without fear that a thing I love so much will be taken from me. But there are no such promises, and love rarely makes such promise. I can’t tell my children that their lives will be easy. I wish I could, and believe it, but I can’t.

One thing—no, two at least--that have not been given to me with any conditions. Love and grace. Love and grace—they are the sky, the stars, the ground, the ocean, the very air I breathe. No one can take these from me, and these I can give freely, freely, forever.

It’s the silver dollars I’m still struggling to find in my pockets, and knowing what I give, slip them into the offering basket. Today my silver dollar is my sense of security, control, and my knowledge of the future. Surely something else would do just as well. Surely it can’t be expected of me. Perhaps it’s not quite clear how much it means to me. And yet, I fumble about in the darkness of my pockets, untangle it from my grasping fingers, and let it go.

And as I watch it disappear down the aisle, as I watch other hands dropping coins—gifts that I cannot begin to understand or know—I feel panic, fear, grief—and then a growing sense that all is okay, not perhaps in the particulars, the lists of worries I love to obsess about—but in the large sense. I ask regret to leave me. All will be well. And all will be well. All manner of things will be well.

I found myself heartily upset that Martin has had to spend his spring break in front of a computer screen, looking for jobs. Mostly I've felt this positive energy, even if it's only simmering, through all of it, but the beginning feeling of crisis has waned into a daily reality--one where my dear friend and companion is often glued to a screen, trying to make sense out of the future. I guess since Mom left a couple days ago, this afternoon was waiting for me--an afternoon of sadness, punctuated by a few hot pops of anger. Sometimes it feels rather like a dream I'm waiting to shake myself from.

But now I feel better. We took a crock pot of pork and sauerkraut over to Kevin and Sally's house, drank a bottle of wine, ate well, and then challenged four pints of Ben and Jerrys--and won! (I don't think we quite finished off the ice cream, though we made an impressive dent). And we laughed a lot--the best medicine of all. And they gave us a disc of "Chopped--" seven episodes of culinary competition. I think I can tear Martin away from the applications long enough to watch one before bedtime. Who will survive to the dessert round? I'm getting excited just thinking about it.

There are unbearable sweetnesses that I will miss. Sitting in the sunroom, the windows flung upon to the garden, robins and cardinals hopping about in the paths softened by leaves, a cup of tea warming my hands. The swelling music of the teapot at night mingling with the quiet roar of the heat kicking on; the creak of stairs, known to me in the dark when all the lights have been turned off before bedtime. And of course opening doors to houses that are not ours and seeing welcoming smiles encompassing us and our children, a scrape of a kitchen chair, long mornings of talk and evenings of laughter.

Now that I know there is an end to this chapter in our lives, I am struggling to remain in the sweetness of each moment. Sitting in the sunnroom this afternoon, I remembered what it was like to look at the garden and see years of work unfolding, wondering how tall the quaking aspens--planted our first fall six years ago--would grow and plotting paths and new beds. I found myself longing for that safe, warm feeling of time unfolding gently in front of me.

I tried to express some of that feeling to Martin, because it made me feel as if I was succumbing to an easy smallness. Martin looked over the rim of his teacup and said, "It's funny, what's happened to me since I found out we'd be leaving. I began to look at all this, and realize it for what it was--a stopping place for us, not a permanent place."

Tonight in my inbox I received a message that should have gone to spam, from the Highlights Foundation. I didn't open it but the subject line caught me: "In revision lies the story." Our lives are constantly being revised, in small ways or large, whether we welcome the changes or not. I don't ever want to find myself in a place where I refuse revision--then I will be looking at that blank, horrible wall that means I have welcomed mediocrity. But I am astonished at the big revisions that life has thrown at me, and most of them I have not sought.

Thankfully, with each revision there is much grace--more than the spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down. There are unexpected rainstorms of mercy, and they often soak me when I am feeling most barren.

So though I have counted multiple, hitherto-unseen white hairs on Martin's head in the last two weeks (not a joke), I am trying to both dwell in the sweetness of each moment here while keeping my hands open. I just want to be ready to walk through the next door, weary and a little travelworn, but with my fingers ready to receive what is next.

In the meantime, I am enjoying the solace of our dear family--my mother who took care of our kids while Martin and I went to a conference for a few days, and then helped me clean out some of the darkest, dingiest places in my house--and our dear friends who have practically bombarded us with their generosity. I keep saying, "Yes, yes, please!" I think it's my duty and my pleasure, at this point in our lives, to take all the grace handed to me without dithering.

I also enjoyed, quite unexpectedly, learning of a petition site for Martin--just look up Martin by his first and last name and add "petition." I don't know who set it up, and Martin won't look at it--he's trying to keep out of the fray as much as possible--but I found it a lovely experience, to read notes from people who have known and loved him. I don't read it with any anger, just with a deep appreciation of our time here, the students Martin knew, many of whom who have sat in around our table and shared their lives with us. We are so grateful.