Fire into Wine

Another beautiful day in Northfield.  Yesterday we watched giant excavators pull up bits of Second street.  Their noises were so loud and their immensity so overpowering that you, sweet boy, did not feel comfortable standing alone to watch.  You settled into my lap, beside your friend Aubin, and stroked your stuffed kitty and stared with wonder and terror.

Today, fire surrounds Holden.  We are watching with wonder and terror the pictures of a smoke filled valley, of firefighters lined up at the silver counter, of a red-flame horizon along the Tailings pile.  We are refreshing our browsers, we are living inside other people's dreams, we are zooming and re-zooming on maps that depict the fire as a red mouth slashed with lines to indicate strength of heat.  We are singing and praying and tagging each other in pictures from long ago.  We are remembering ponderosa pines and fiddlehead ferns and cottonwood leaves shimmering in late afternoon light.  We are wading though our memories, touching with our minds the blond beams in the fireside room, ice cream containers housing yarn, scalding knives fresh from the Hobart.  These memories and prayers are the warm lap we sit in while we watch the fire unfold.

Yesterday, while digging for a recipe for Rita's Triple Treats (to make for tonight's Holden Evening prayer gathering) I came across a recipe for Blackberry "Fire" Wine.  The note says "This wine was made with the blackberries at Field's Point during the 2007 evacuation."  I loved this--partly because it made me laugh, partly because it made my mouth water, partly because I love the sense of creativity bursting forth in the middle of exile.  If Jesus can turn water into wine, why can't fire be turned into wine too?  I sort of like the idea of Railroad Creek valley as vineyard.

I have never really believed in praying for miracles.  I have prayed for miracles, for huge shifts of the heart, healing in the body, peace between warring nations.  But I have always understood that the real prayer I should pray, the one I can always expect to be answered, if for God's presence through all of it.  I've always understood that God reminds us of this presence through human contact mostly, through hugs and smiles, through offerings of food and quiet listening, but sometimes also through moments in nature or words encountered at the right moment on the page, a song working its way to the heart at the right instant.

I am wary of praying for miracles because I fear what will happen to my faith when the miracle doesn't happen.  Certainly, miracles do arrive for some people--but for every cancer patient saved by a miracle, what of the thousands who are not?  For every person miraculously saved from an avalanche, what of the broken bodies never found?  Miracles seem like fishy business to me because they seem to suggest a hierarchy--certain people or places are saved while others are not.  I don't believe in a God of hierarchies.  I don't believe in a God of this person but not that one.  I don't believe in a God who shows more favor to a remote village in the mountains than a church in Charleston, South Carolina.

But the Bible is filled with miracles.  Blind people see, lame people walk, water turns into wine, water turns into something you can stand upon, men spend days inside large fish, arks hold two of every creature and a sea parts so that people can walk through to safety.  In the Bible, people and places are chosen.  I am having trouble reconciling this, making sense of this in my head.

Because the truth is that I want Holden to be chosen.  I want God to save those buildings.  I want a bubble of safety over it.  I want a story to tell my grandchildren of how the fire came and went but Holden was saved.  

I am wary of miracles and I am praying for a miracle.

The village has been planning for fire for a long time.  If Holden is saved, it will be due to the forethought of smart people, to the hands that installed sprinkler systems and cleared brush, to the firefighters wrapping the buildings in tinfoil skirts, to the "fab five" villagers who are working without ceasing.   But I am not certain that all of that intelligence and bravery and preparation will be enough; fire is, by its nature, unpredictable.  I am sitting and waiting.

I am wary of miracles and I am praying for a miracle nonetheless.

Birthing and Burning

It's August and you, Matteus Mark, are two years old.

It's August and here in Northfield the humidity has cleared and the blue skies are shimmied with puffy streaks of white.  Flower boxes are overflowing and bikers stand outside Blue Monday, wiping dust from their spandex shorts and blowing cool air over the tops of their coffee cups.  You're home with a babysitter, probably cooking cupcakes in the play kitchen or watching the diggers tear up Second street or taking Baby Tay for a ride in the doll-sized stroller.

Across the country, a fire is creeping closer to Holden.  There are no people left in the village, just whatever sound the huge sprinklers make sending water over the forest and buildings.  Just whatever sound the fire makes, deciding what to devour next.

You speak in four or five word sentences.  "What happened in this book?" "Mama sit right here." "Thisbe wake up now." "Pushing Baby in stroller." "Raisins in oatmeal please."  You like present participles, everything happening right now and continuously: sitting, standing, sleeping, eating. 

The dim scabs of bug bites decorate your arms and legs, your right cheek, the back of your neck, the bridge of your nose.  You like to cuddle and tickle.  You are ridiculously sweet.

Thisbe is dressed in green today (actually turquoise that she adamantly swears is green) for her second day of Vacation Bible School.  The theme is G-Force and the hallways of Bethel are decorated with orange cones and rolls of black paper dotted with white lines.  A cheetah puppet talks to the children about God while they roll on the floor or sit slack jawed, staring.  Thisbe's learned half of one song (something about "small as a bug" and "tall as a tree").  On the first day she made a shrinky-dink in the shape of a shoe, "helped everyone remember that story about Moses in the basket" and made a "real tornado!" inside two water bottles held together with glitter tape.  For snack, there were white chocolate chips and M and M's.  She's in heaven.

Above Lake Chelan is a cloak of smoke.  It's sometimes a haze and sometimes a high white plume and sometimes gauze in the lungs.

You demand to read a book filled with fire trucks but empty of plot at least 73 times each day.  You subsist mainly on yogurt and fruit and oatmeal and eggs and noodles and bread and peanut butter and rice.  On Mondays we go to the farm and choose eggplants and peppers and bushy stalks of kale.  We clip the flowers that don't have bees nesting inside them and we're thankful to see the bees nesting anywhere at all.

What we know about fire in a forest is that most of the time it's part of a cycle that's good and necessary.  It's the way nature needs to behave in order to be healthy.  But it's also true that global warming has caused higher than normal temperatures, has sucked the water from much of the west coast this summer.  This fire's blossoming spread may have more to do with the harm we've caused the earth than the earth cyclical ability to rejuvenate itself.  But the truth is that whatever caused or prolonged the fire, Railroad Creek Valley was going to burn eventually.

But there is a village in Railroad Creek and that village is the spiritual center of my life.  I learned to become myself in that village.  That village has transformed and sustained thousands of people over the years.  All of us are different for having passed through that place.


I am, you are, part of a community that believes death never has the final word.  We believe in resurrection.  And we believe good care of the planet is part of our job and our responsibility.  But on the other side of that village burning are so many unknowns: whether we would be allowed to rebuild, whether there would be enough money to rebuild, whether people would care enough to make that happen.  And even if rebuilding occurred, there would be many long years of absence and charred remains.  The truth is that for all our preaching and belief otherwise, to face the death of some one or some place you love is terrible and terrifying. 

So, like you Matteus, we occupy the present participles that pull us through these hours and days, that make time a river instead of a past or a future.  Railroad Creek is still running.  And we are waiting and hoping and praying...for the village to be saved, yes, but also for the good courage to face that possible death and the faith to believe in the new life that exists on the other side.

Ireland

We're in Cork, Ireland.

You slept a little on the plane, curled on my lap or Daddy's, arms bent below the thin, navy airplane blanket that I think has been around since the dawn of time.

Before you slept on the plane I tried to get you to sleep on the plane by bouncing you in the Ergo, your head forcibly pressed to my breastbone, whispering all the animal noises on Old MacDonald's farm.  I stood between the lavatories, facing the blue curtain the flight attendants drew to give them privacy as they heated tins of food in the galley kitchen.  As I bounced and pressed and sang, little fragments of rainbow light appeared on the curtain, a reminder that we were following the sun.

You have a rash, a constellation of red pimples below the right corner of your mouth so when you squirm and writhe in the stroller because we've walked too much and you've walked too little you look like an angry teenager.

In the stroller cup holder we keep chocolate eggs with fragile pastel shells, Twix bars I buy with the extra money I'm given at lunch, and a variety of different kinds of biscuits.  Bribery has become a way of life.

Lift, flat, trolley, biscuit, hob.  We're re-learning how to say what we mean.

Thisbe a fluorescent speck below the white sweep of an amphitheater, dancing.  Thisbe a fluorescent lemur in a flowering purple bush the size of an RV, trying to mimic a new friend's accent.  Failing miserably.

Houses like a row of Necco wafers, repeating in the river.

Everything and nothing about our lives is different here.

To Do the Impossible Thing

It's been an embarrassingly long time since I've written, as evidenced by the Carleton students crossing the street in shorts, the men resting their bikes against the side of the coffee shop in even tighter shorts, in the green fuzzing of the bush across the street, in the songs melting out through the open windows of sedans and minivans alike.

Thisbe went off to Gak's for an overnight (and procured gold and shiny and glittery flip flops that don't even have any straps on the back!!!!!--according to her breathless voice on the phone) and so you sat with us in the breakfast nook this afternoon, after you'd finished your peanut butter and jelly sandwich.  You looked out the window and said "kitty bye-bye," and "Di-dee bye-bye" and "boat swim" and finally, noting the Kristen Gilje painting on the wall, "Holden!  Holden!"  You're a tiny parrot, often spitting the last few words of my sentences right back at me.

"Should we go to the library now?"

"Library!  Now!"

"I'm going to put the chicken in the oven."

"Chicken!  Oven!"

Or, at lunch:

"He is just so sweet sometimes."

"So!  Sweet!"

Then again and again, wrinkling up your nose and laughing: "Sweet! Sweet! Sweet! Sweet!"

You love to be outside and you cry as if we were ripping the very world from your skin when we bring you inside.  Even if you're not actually doing anything.  Yesterday you were just sitting in the pebble-filled playground of Way Park, absent-mindedly running your fingers through bits of rock, when we told you it was time to go.  "No, no!" you said.   Hysterics ensued.

Today at church I was sitting behind a couple with a seven-month-old.  Midway through the service the baby started smiling at his father, that very first newborn smile where the baby is learning his lips, trying to stretch them in a way that says here is some joy for you.  And you could tell, from the way the parents bent their heads over him, that he'd never smiled so much or so long.  And the parents were clearly so hungry for the glimpse of the baby's personality, to know how he wears joy.

I felt the tiny stab of course--the never-again-that-moment-exactly-with-a-baby-of-ours stab--but gratitude for getting to witness that moment.  The purity of that sort of happiness.

And I was also grateful for how much better we know you now.  Your sweetness, yes.  But also the way you cock your head to the side and look downward if you've done something wrong.  Also the way you'll pick your nose or drop food off your tray or pull your own hair if I tell you in a faux-stern voice absolutely NOT to do that.  You slide in and out of sleep easily and you're generally content as long as you're with us--until you can't get a Lego affixed or open the lid of a jar of beads or push the shopping cart over the lip of metal that separates the kitchen from the dining room.  Then you shriek and yell "hep!  hep!" until someone comes along to help you.

I got to wear my joy face a lot this last week.  I won an award for a book I wrote and many people I love were there at the ceremony: Daddy and Gak and Ampa and Mark and Dot; Emily and Ally and Bonnie and Jodi; friends from Supergroup and buddies from the Mentor Series.  I wore a black dress and a necklace I made our of fuchsia, rectangular stones.  I curled my hair and swirled blush and powder around on my cheeks.  When I won I was stuttery.  I walked to the podium with hunched shoulders because I was so intent on not tripping in my heels.  They projected my joy face on two big screens and gave me a glass trophy that was almost as heavy as you.  I was very happy.  (Or: I was happy as a writer can be who also feels bad for the people who didn't win and thinks maybe she really shouldn't have been the one to win and hopes she's being the right amount of not-acting-narcissistic but also not being the too-Minnesota-humble that's a little pukey in it's own right).

But the best part was seeing Daddy's face.  And Gak's face.  And Mark's face.  Because the joy dies pretty quick if when you smile no one returns it, no one reflects it right back at you.  I got a lot of smiles--or e-mails or Facebook "likes" or phone calls that were the equivalent of smiles this week.  And for that I'm really grateful.  Because it is not always an easy thing to be happy for someone else.  I have friends who are hurting in some of the deepest ways someone can hurt right now, friends who have lost relationships or miscarried; friends whose writing is not getting recognized in the way that it should be or who are hella tired from supporting the other beings in their lives.

We all deserve to be recognized.  We all deserve the walk to the podium and the statue that looks like Elsa's frozen mucus.  But most of the time no one sees our bravest moments; the ones most worthy of a standing ovation.

So we're responsible, I think, for trying to see them in each other.  For trying to recognize the person sitting with grief rather than shoving it away or the friend who manages to ask how you are in the hours before the scan to see if his cancer has returned.  

I'm so proud, Matteus, of each two-word sentence, each new expression of yourself.  I'll be watching you, sweetest.  I'll be marking the moments where you muster the courage or the skill or the grace or the compassion to do the impossible thing.

Temptation

 Cold and bright today.  Wool sweaters.  Car panting in the driveway for long minutes before we could climb inside.  Sunlight banking off the frozen slugs of ice still clinging to portions of the sidewalk, the street.  It's Lent and today is the day when Jesus gets baptized and then tempted in the desert.  Because it's winter the temptations we face don't seem deeply interesting: zoning out in front of the computer, pouring a highly unnecessary extra glass of wine, circling too anxiously around ourselves (our own fates, our own jobs, our own book sales, our own pale and flaking reflections in the mirror).  Not interesting, but problematic nonetheless.

When I left the house you were screaming.  You pooped yourself awake after sleeping for about half an hour and refused to lean back into the arms of slumber.  You've grown up a lot in the two months since I last wrote.  We've been to Holden and back and you've slept in the rocking car of a train and in a (relatively) unmoving glaciated valley.  You now say tons of words: bus and cracker and milk and water and truck and baby and book and nana and buh-buh-wee and flower and piano and bye-bye and hi and hat and...on and on.  You insist on calling Daddy "Ga-Ga" although the fact that you call Thisbe "Di-dee" affirms that you can, in fact, make the "d" sound.

Di-dee, books, baths, and vacuums are a few of your favorite things.  You're content paging through books for endless amounts of time; you patter around in search of where Di-dee has hidden herself; you squeal and hop from foot to foot when the vacuum roars to life; you would spend your life in the bathtub if you could.

You played by yourself quite well yesterday, puttering through the room with a block or a spatula or your stuffed kitty while Daddy and I talked to the Holden students over cinnamon rolls and Cougar Gold cheese and coffee--or later when we ate pizza and drank wine with old friends.  The workers in the toddler room describe you as "chill." 

And your sister has changed too.  She is more amenable, less vitriolic.  Fewer tantrums, fewer accidents, no constipation issues.  Holden was tough but I think being in a new environment, around older kiddos, helped her become a better self. 

Yesterday I watched you and your sister in the bath, both of you crowded beneath the running faucet.  Thisbe's body is now skin stretched over bones that threaten to poke through that surface for air.  Her shoulder blades and collar bone look like sheathed weapons.  You are still all pudge: rolls at your belly, under your chin, bubbles of pudge where your arms meet your armpits.  Thisbe was holding a yellow plastic bowl and feeding you water with a silver spoon.  You kept bending forward to accept the spoonful and then leaning back and touching your index fingers together to signal "more, more."  The water had darkened your hair and her hair and your eyes looked unbelievably huge, your lashes tremendously heavy. 

Sometimes my temptation is to look away when things are going well.  When you're puttering quietly or Thisbe is doing a puzzle, when you're both actually playing together away from me without screaming or needing.  For me that moment is a temptation to shift my focus.  Given the opportunity to relax for 30 seconds, I usually start cutting zucchini or checking Facebook or asking Daddy a question about who is going to write the check for March release days.  I mostly interpret your moments of contentment as permission to look away rather than looking more deeply toward.  And sometimes, God help us, looking away and reading an Onion article is absolutely necessary.  But I think sometimes my venting about the two of you comes from the fact that I choose to look away from the moments that would bring me the most joy.

So I think my Lenten discipline will be to try not to look away.  So seek out a view of you both in those moments of peace, of calm, of discovery, of cooperation, of silly and exuberant joy.

"Sheesh!"

Did we go straight from a 6:30am flight to Santa's lap?  Yes, yes we did.

It's the day before the day before Christmas.  It's 34 degrees and the sleet-snow that covered our cars this morning has run into the gutters.  Thin gray clouds moving fast over a slightly lighter thin gray sky.  The coffee shop is full of people home for the holidays talking to people they think they should talk to when home for the holidays.  Or they sit at tables and check their iphones simultaneously. 

Today both you and your sister are at daycare so it's a special holiday for Daddy and I.  A holiday filled with grading and last minute holiday errands: wine and sweet vermouth and whole milk and butter and powdered sugar and grapes and sugar snap peas.

You are, 90% of the time, the sweetest creature imaginable.  We flew to Maryland and back last week and you actually were NOT a holy terror on the plane.  You were quite content to move from my lap to Dada's, to have Thisbe press butterfly stickers to your cheeks, to munch thousands of graham crackers, to point out to lion, the teapot, the umbrella.  Your lexicon mostly consists of "ba" and the closely related "ba-ba" which actually makes you sound reasonably smart when you point to a ball, a bubble, the bath, or a sheep.  Oddly, you also say Jesus but it comes out as "sheesh."  So there's a lot of pointing to creche scenes and saying "sheesh!  sheesh!"  You like to be close, to be cuddled.  Your daycare workers describe you as "chill" and are not worried about your upcoming transition to the toddler room. 

Your sister remains the opposite.  She continues to have a tough year.  Struggles with constipation and anxiety.  Today she asked me which Santa I thought would be coming to our house tomorrow.  "What do you mean which Santa?" I asked.  "Well, there's the Santa who came to Gak's party and the Santa we saw yesterday at the store.  I don't think the one at the store was the real one."  Which made me realize that we were idiots to introduce her to two different Santas.  But her comment also made me feel that crack, that sliver of the real world that's beginning to creep across the veneer of safety and certainty of the world we've created for her.

I've been feeling bad this year for the way, in all honesty, we celebrate Santa more than Jesus in our house.  Your father has been good about trying to wedge an advent reading into the twenty seconds between when we sit down at the table and all hell breaks loose but I'm not certain those readings are sinking in too much. 

This time of year stresses me out.  Me and a lot of upper middle class Americans.  It's not really justified stress, it's created entirely out of our own consumptive choices.  Not just stuff but also experiences.  Building a ginger bread house!  Going to see "The Grinch Who Stole Christmas"!  Going to see the "Nutcracker"!  Drinking coffee and shrieking at the Santa party!  And there are adult versions of all this too: holiday work parties!  holiday book parties! holiday drinks with friends!  I think until this year I didn't realize that my over-full feeling comes not just from the cookies and Manhattans and tinsel and wrapping paper and gifts but also from the fifty zillion Christmas activities that we should do because they are so fun dammit!  The accumulation of experience as its own kind of consumption.

My own favorite holiday moment will be seeing your sister on Christmas morning (assuming no one is puking or running a fever KNOCK ON WOOD).  The absolute joy that I think comes not only from the mystery of wrapped packages but also the mystery of this mythic figure showing up.  Making himself known.  And I think there's part of me that likes watching because a part of me wishes God worked that way too. 

And part of me aches to have Thisbe's relationship with God work this way.  Cookie crumbs and wrapped Elsa dolls so that she sees and feels in a palpable way that she is remembered, that she is loved, that she is not forgotten.

Instead she is transitioning into seeing this world.  The one where thousands die of Ebola.  Where students at the St. Olaf need to lay their bodies down for four minutes so that we remember that black lives matter.  Where someone can go out for a walk and fall or be hit by a car and changed, hurt, instantly.  Where cancer slides its grubby fingers into people that we love and each day animals vanish and disappear and don't ever come back again. 

And the truth: in the middle of all of this, God does not always show up.  Or rather, God does not always show up in the way we want God to show up.  If you're being persecuted and someone promises you a savior, I bet it sucks pretty bad when all you get is a baby.  We've made baby Jesus into the happy ending of the story we tell today.  But a baby is not a leader or a conqueror or a politician or a lobbyist or a radical or a medical professional or a genius or a scientist.  A baby sure as hell does not solve the practical problems of someone who is suffering.

It is hard to learn that the world is a complex place, full of violence and pain and rage and hate in addition to the joy and peace and reverence and love. And it is harder still to learn that a sparkling figure will not arrive to offer us exactly what we desire.  It's easy to help a kiddo have faith in Santa Claus; it's harder to help a child to have faith in a God who mostly appears in the shards of grace and goodness in those around us. 


So this year Santa will not bring Thisbe exactly what she desires.  There will be no Disney Elsa doll below the tree.

Instead there will be the Creative Kidstuff knock-off Elsa doll.  Because, you know, baby steps.

This photo has nothing to do with Christmas.

This photo also has nothing to do with Christmas.

Extra Laps

Six degrees this morning.  Blue skies and all the parking lines downtown smudged away with snow and ice.  We bundle you in a coat that makes you look like the Michelin Man and an ear-flapped hat and mittens that velcro around your wrists.  You rip the mittens off and by the time we get anywhere, your hands curled into cold comma marks.

Anytime we ask you for a word, you say "gah-gah" which sometimes sounds like "cracker" or "dada" but nothing like "boat" or "spoon" or "weevil."  Unlike Thisbe, who resorted to anger and screams of rage when she didn't obtain desired objects as a toddler, you resort to acting like a heartbroken teenager.  Yesterday, after I mixed the batter for a pan of brownies, you pointed at the bowl emphatically.  "No," I said, "all done."  Then I even washed the bowl and showed you the glow of the clean glass to further reassert my point.  But your face simply melted downwards, the edges of your lips threatening to run over the bottom of your jaw, tears streaming freely.  You sat, cried mournfully for a few seconds, and then laid on the floor, cheek to linoleum, and cried further.  You did this until your sister entered with a drum over her head at which point you promptly got up and started following her, signing "please, please" against your chest. 

You repeat this process (desire, grief, desire, grief) probably ten times every hour about tragedies like: not getting to go outside, not being permitted to play with Mommy's computer, not getting to touch the pot of boiling pasta, not getting to color with permanent markers.  It's like the Gestapo around here as far as you're concerned.

Your sister is decidedly your sister.  She likes to spend her post-dinner hours leaping from the couch to the ottoman and back, often for hours.  She also enjoys drawing pictures of houses, stars, flowers and carriages pulled by slaves (thanks, Sunday school).  On Saturday, in the middle of a playdate, I found Thisbe and her friend Mae sitting on the floor of Thisbe's room sliding their legs open, closed, open, closed.  They were pretending to be swimming instructors.  Inspired by the fact that she is now forced to sit through the entire service on Sunday mornings, she often spends Sunday evening carrying around a Lutheran Book of Worship and offering us songs and prayers composed on the spot.  Yesterday one included the line, "this is my chance to walk away / God loves Jesus and the day."  Last week there was a lengthy section that went back and forth between "God have mercy on me" and "God worship me."

Your father and I spend our days scrambling eggs for you in the morning and picking up tambourines and rubber ducks in the evening.  Your father wore the same purple sweater every day last week as part of an exercise for his creation/environment class.  I tell my students to cut up facts and information, to spread it across their dorm room floors and rearrange.  Your father shovels, heaves bags of dirty diapers out the back door, washes the dishes while you head-butt his thighs.  I exclaim over the new design in the foam of my latte at Blue Monday, carmelize sweet potatoes and onion and kale, return library books before they expire.  Every once in awhile we walk together around the track at the YMCA and every once in awhile we have to think about a big change or the absence of the possibility of change.  Every once in awhile his eyes glaze with tears or mine do and for a few laps we hold hands.