Hot Days, Hot Girlfriends, and The Middle of the Middle of the Middle
It’s Wednesday. Not only is it Wednesday, it is June 15th. It’s the middle of the week of the middle of the month of the middle month of the year.
Today is the middle of the middle of the middle. It’s the middliest of the middle. In my mind, this is significant.
The “feels like” temperature was over 100 degrees this afternoon. The purple basil, once flush with fresh leaf and blooms I had to pinch back every day, is looking a bit wilted and bedraggled. I hear my grandkids outside my office window, bouncing a basketball in our culdesac as The Preacher cheers their attempts and the sun sets.
In the hot, tired middle, we who are in it need retooling, desperately. After all, we have probably experienced sickness, difficulty, even betrayal, and our wide-eyed innocence is as wilted and weak as purple basil in a hundred degrees. I don’t know about you, but I have gotten older and wiser, and I’m just not mature enough anymore to shrug off cynicism. I have to avoid it. I even have to push back on it, everywhere I see it trying to languish my joy.
The tiniest consolations are as big a miracle to me, now, as walking on water. This world is so rife with strife and war and pestilence, that a glass of iced tea with an Alabamian friend, the snaggle-toothed smiles of grandchildren, or field flowers in the scorching sun, all alike are tender miraculous mercies, not to be taken for granted. Noticing something small - granular, even - something centered in the day I am actually in, pulls me back from the abyss of apathy that so many others in their middle seem to have fallen into.
Today has been as hot as the hinges on the gates to hell, but the birds are still singing out there, delighting in the blue hour. Wildflowers thrive, and wildly so, because they’ve become acclimated to the weather that is, not the managed outcomes of greenhouse conditions.
The Preacher picked up some Chinese takeout for our supper tonight, because I had a magazine article deadline. (I can’t feel upset about this, when I’ve waited all my life to be able to say it!). Of course, I went for my fortune cookie, first. It said:
The one who knows enough is enough, will always have enough.
So, on this middle day of the week, in the middle of the month that is the middle of the year, I stop to say to my soul, “It is enough.” Every ordinary day is crammed with glory, springing up even from roots set in parched, hot earth.
And because “I am not an adventurer by choice but by fate”, tomorrow I leave for Birmingham, Alabama.
Van Gogh said that, and I partly believe it. Because something akin to “fate” crossed the paths of The Preacher and I, with these friends - Mark and Jennifer, pastors of Life of Faith Church in Birmingham. It all began with them being “friends of a friend”, but now I don’t know which friend is the friend of a friend, them, or the couple who introduced us. I reckon we are all each others dear ones, now.
And because I hate travel, and never engage it without a good reason, you could say I’m an adventurer by fate, not choice. Whether it’s Italy, Nashville, France, or Birmingham - it’s all the same to me. I’d rather stay home, but the love of God compels me.
As does the laughter of a good, southern preacher’s wife.
Me, thinking about 18-wheelers on the interstate
I’ll be back, come Monday.
Have a beautiful, middle evening. And then a beautiful weekend, this sweet middle-month.
Middle Marriage, Moonlight, and Fireflies
It’s that time of year again. The East Tennessee air becomes something this southern woman wears, and the field flowers frame all the roads where we live - urban, suburban or rural, no matter. Whether country lane or four lane, or daunting interstate rife with eighteen wheelers, the grassy hedges to each side of the various pavements are laden with stems of swaying, nodding color.
In between finishing my upcoming online art course, writing for a couple of magazines, and trips back and forth to church, I’ve managed to squeeze in daily walks in what we affectionately call “Mimi’s Meadow”. Only yesterday, being a Sunday and all, what has normally been a first thing in the morning thing, became a last thing before sunset thing.
And I couldn’t have been more pleased.
Middle Marriage, Moonlight, and Fireflies
Oh, it’s just a minute and forty-some-odd seconds of nothing, but it is less than two minutes of everything.
The sun rose early yesterday, with just a few clouds in sight. The Preacher donned his helmet, and fired up his pretend Vespa (a vintage Honda Elite), heading out to preach, with me following a half hour behind him in the huge white Ford truck. I couldn’t help but think, as I gripped the steering wheel, hugging my side of the narrow two lane highway to Harvest Church, about how that we are less than ten days away from summer, and our Appalachian Spring seems to have gone by in a blur of breezes, and rainy afternoons and bright moments. After two years of “Pandemic Pastoring”, we are looking ahead into the next season with sweet anticipation.
And we’ve grown ever more mindful of the fact of our embodied faith, together. This has been a long, breaking two years, for so many bodies. Some bodies still endure the effects of “long Covid”….some bodies are gone altogether, their spirits forever with the Lord.
As a result, things like the snaggle-toothed smiles of grandkids, the soft downy feathers of our daughter’s four urban culdesac baby ducks, and the smell of garlic from the gardens have become Remarkable Events.
No, but really. We remark upon them, we reflect upon them, we discuss them all, we openly and vulnerably savor the aching beauty of being alive by tasting each others’ words, as we walk and sweat and sweat and walk.
Usually, these conversations are followed by a fast drive home, by cleaning our bodies up, and a full day.
But yesterday was a Sunday. Did I tell you that, already?
Since it was The Lord’s Day, we went at it with an instinctively gentler pace. The skies were twilight pastel, the trees in blue hour silhouette, and we inhaled the soft fragrance of nightfall in a meadow full of green grass and wildflowers. A few eager birds who were still awake sung to us with soothing tunes.
It’s all worth remembering. And so I write it down.