by Christie Purifoy | Feb 19, 2014 | Home, motherhood, Pennsylvania, river, Uncategorized, Winter
Last week, it snowed here at Maplehurst. Even after ten years lived in Chicago, I don’t think I have ever seen so much snow fall all at once. Granted, I left Chicago for Florida the winter before the once-in-a-decade, cars-stranded-on-Lakeshore Drive monster storm.
I remember that winter well. It was my first in Florida. Everyone I knew – neighbors at the bus stop, new friends at church – kept saying the same thing. Aren’t you glad you don’t live there anymore?
Which only made me want to cry. Because, no. The answer was no. I did wish I was there. In the snow. With my friends. In a place that felt like home.
*
*
But now I feel at home again, although in a new place, and there is snow, and I am grateful. Crazy-eyed from the pileup of canceled-school days and disruptions to my cherished daily routines, but still grateful.
The evening after our Pennsylvania nor’easter, I looked out the window just after sunset. I saw what looked like a deep and rising sea of snow. I could even point out small windblown waves. As darkness blurred the edges of everything, those waves began to rise and fall. And creep higher. Deeper. Or, they seemed to. I felt the irrational worry that seawater would soon be seeping in around the window frames.
It was strange and startling. It was also beautiful.
Twenty-four hours later, our long driveway had finally been cleared. I walked the length of it, from front porch to mailbox, and decided the scene looked just like a wedding cake. Thick white frosting smoothed to perfection, and a driveway sliced cleanly away.
*
I tend to see the world in layered images like these. The result of a lifetime of reading, I suppose. The trick, I’m discovering, is holding on to both. Acknowledging the truth of both.
Snow-covered field and rising floodwaters. A freshly-plowed driveway and a slice of wedding cake.
Maplehurst is like this, too. It is an old, gracious, crumbling-a-bit-around-the-edges house. It is the scene of our daily happiness and daily headaches. The place where children laugh, and I yell at them to take their fun outside. Outside! I say. You can scream at your brother all you like just please don’t do it under my feet while I’m cooking dinner!
Yes, I’m afraid you’ll hear exactly that every day at 5 pm.
Maplehurst is also our dream-come-true. In spiritual terms, it is a fountain. A blessing. The one place on earth that, for me, is nearest to the throneroom of God. There is a river and it flows straight through an avenue of old maple trees.
It is both, and I must see both.
The spiritual reality is likely the most important, the most real, but I can’t let it crowd out the rest. If I’m going to write honestly and live honestly, I can’t forget the ground beneath my feet. I can’t forget what 5 pm feels like.
And it isn’t only honesty at stake. It is also love. If I am going to love my neighbor well, I can’t stop seeing the dirtiness of my own patch of dirt. I can’t forget that we are all together in this land of muddy snow and headaches and 5 pm yelling.
*
5 pm is still quite a few hours away. In the freshness of a quiet morning (the children have finally returned to school, the baby is happy and miraculously occupied with toys too big to be a choking hazard), something new occurs to me. Maybe, the trick is not learning to hold on to two true things. Maybe, there aren’t two realities: one spiritual, the other temporal. Maybe there is only the one. Maybe I must learn to see without splitting everything in two.
Maybe, there is glory in the dirt.
*
“I am mountain, I am dust
Constellations made of us
There’s glory in the dirt
A universe within the sand
Eternity within a man
We are ocean, we are mist
Brilliant fools who wound and kiss
There’s beauty in the dirt
Wandering in skin and soul
Searching, longing for a home.”
– from “I am Mountain,” by Michael Gungor and Lisa Gungor
*
*
by Christie Purifoy | Feb 14, 2014 | children, Community, Gardening, motherhood, Uncategorized
It’s Valentine’s Day, and I’m sharing a story of friendship. Really, though, I’m telling you that carrots are the new roses, and I want to give 250 South African orphans and vulnerable children a garden. A garden! Of course, I can’t do it on my own. But Valentine’s Day is just the day for acknowledging that I am not alone, and you are not alone, and those children? Not alone. Not forgotten. Join me?
When I first met Lisa-Jo, she was an attorney at a powerful Chicago law firm and I was a PhD candidate at an elite university. We were both pursuing Big Plans, and we were both very far from home. Though, admittedly, Lisa-Jo’s family in South Africa were just a wee bit farther away than my own in Texas.
Recently, she and I talked about those long ago young women and what they would think of our current lives. We agreed they would be horrified.
Which is only one more reason why I’m glad I don’t have final control over my life. Left to my own devices, I would never even have discovered my dreams, let alone seen them realized.
(photos courtesy of Lisa-Jo Baker)
Back then Lisa-Jo was determined never to be a mother. I was desperate for kids but couldn’t get pregnant. We got to know one another in a church small group for young married couples. Over the course of only a few weeks, most of those couples, two by two, announced unexpected pregnancies. Lisa-Jo and I became like storm-tossed survivors clinging to the same life preserver.
I will always be grateful for the wreck of those days, for the way unhappiness tossed us together. And I will always be grateful for the many ways in which Lisa-Jo held on to me, and to our friendship, despite the travels and adventures, the heartaches and the joys to come.
Today, she is not an attorney and I am not a professor, and when we spend time together, there are seven children tugging at our elbows. I don’t think either one of us will ever stop feeling surprised at the way things have turned out. I know we will never stop being grateful.
In fact, surprise and gratitude are at the heart of Lisa-Jo’s new book. You can pre-order a copy of Surprised by Motherhood: Everything I Never Expected about Being a Mom
, and I highly recommend that you do. I am lucky enough to have read an early copy, and it is a powerful story, beautifully told.
It is a memoir of motherhood, and there is a lot of pink on the cover, but I hope that many men will find this book as well. Lisa-Jo’s is a story that speaks especially to mothers, but, like all good stories, it is for everyone.
Today is Valentine’s Day, and I can’t think of a better way to mark that holiday on this blog than by telling you about the great big love flash mob being organized by my friend Lisa-Jo. Thanks to her vision and hard work, you and I have the opportunity to send – not roses – but an entire garden. And we get to send that garden to a community in South Africa eager to plant and cultivate and harvest.
We want to give a garden to the orphans and vulnerable children of the Maubane Community Center. The cost is $5000. We want to do this in one day.
It’s happening here.
by Christie Purifoy | Feb 11, 2014 | Grateful, Home, Pennsylvania, rest, Uncategorized, Winter
Last week, I wrote a few words in praise of The Slow Life. And you responded.
So many of you said you live in just the same way. Or try to. Or want to. And I was pleased. Maybe even a little smug in my self-satisfaction.
And then ice blew in on the wind, and I learned something: my vision of the good, slow life is highly dependent on hot coffee in the morning. And hot tea in the afternoon. And cozy heat in the radiators and running water in the tub. And, well, creature comforts of every kind.
But there are days when the carpet of your usual choices does not roll out at your feet. Days that do not begin with hot coffee and do not end on the sofa watching PBS with your husband.
What does this slow life look like when we are not comfortable? On those days, is the slow life we crave even possible?
On our first day without power, I spent many hours reading on my old pink settee by the light from my bedroom windows. It was cozy under a blanket, and the baby took a good nap. The cold hadn’t yet settled into our bones the way it would on day two.
But I wasn’t comfortable. I was on edge. Every few minutes I would hear a rending, cracking sound, and I would sit up looking left to right, left to right, trying to see which tree was losing its battle with the ice this time. When a 120-year-old maple tree loses a limb, that limb is still the size of a large tree. And those large trees fall with a grinding sound of splintered wood, and a crashing sound of falling limbs, and the shattering sound of a shower of ice.
When I lived in Chicago, I would often come across a sweep of broken windshield glass glittering on the sidewalk. Sometimes, I would find more and more of it leading from car to car and on to my own car parked on the street with a startled look where the front windshield once was.
Late in the day, I took a short walk, and I remembered all that broken glass. By then the temperature had warmed to the low 30s and a lot of the ice had dropped its hold on the trees and scattered in the wind. You could see it everywhere, great sweeps of it sprinkled on top of the frozen snow.
I stepped carefully, shielding my eyes against the glittery light, and realized that the whole sky must be made of glass, like the windshield of a car.
And someone had taken a hammer to it.
There are quiet days and there are days we are convinced someone, somewhere is wielding a hammer.
And, honestly, I’m still waiting for whoever’s in charge to put down the hammer because the suitcases we packed when we decamped to a hotel have disgorged their contents in every room like last night’s dinner, and I’m sick with a cold and a pounding headache, and they say another big storm is headed our way.
And yet, I still want to say this: there’s a still point in this turning world. On the quiet days it grows in us, we welcome it into our hearts with coffee cups and dinners together and hours with a book and bedtime stories read by the fireplace and candlelight at breakfast just because.
And when the hammer falls, and the sky does come falling, that still point doesn’t leave us as we duck and take cover. It’s still there in our hearts and still out there in the world. Leaning over, catching our breath, we might spot it.
To me, this day, it looks like one splintered tree fallen just to the right of my car and one splintered tree fallen just to the left. It looks like another tree lying broken just beside the kids’ playset and another huge limb right beside the henhouse.
Looking around, I would swear that no trees fell on this hill.
They were placed.
(Also, my husband says he’ll slice the old maple wood into pretty round platters for serving bread and cheese, so there’s that.)
by Christie Purifoy | Feb 4, 2014 | Jesus, motherhood, rest, Uncategorized, Work
I worry a great deal about the shape of my days.
This worry is a symptom of privilege. It means I have choices. For the most part, my days are not ruled by desperate necessity.
Instead, each one of my days unrolls like a red carpet. It is a carpet woven with hundreds of tiny choices. First, what should I feed the baby for breakfast? Next, should I spend this hour playing Candyland with the four-year-old or cleaning the kitchen? Then, should I read a book while the baby naps or try to write something? Until, should I spend the evening balancing the checkbook or watching PBS with Jonathan?
Choice after beautiful choice until my day is spent, and I lie in bed wondering where the hours fled. What did I accomplish today? Why did I never manage to send those emails? How could I have forgotten to do the grocery shopping / take that book back to the library / return that phone call / schedule that appointment?
Worry. Guilt. A resolve to do better tomorrow but never quite sure what tomorrow should look like. This is the blessing and the burden of choice.
I am an overly sensitive, introverted person. I require a great deal of space in my days: time for sitting and thinking. Time for sitting and reading. Time for taking that walk, pulling the baby behind me in her sled. Never enough time for cooking or cleaning or whatever else it is I’m supposed to be doing in my life as wife and mother.
Which means, I rarely do anything without guilt. Guilt says, shouldn’t you be doing more / working harder / accomplishing bigger?
(photo by yours truly)
I don’t think this is only a problem for mothers at home with small children. I can remember breaking out in hives from the stress of life as a college student. My life is more complicated now, but I have, at least, learned to avoid that kind of strain. I have learned, at least, to let myself live slowly, even if the price I pay is no longer hives but a constant, low-level guilt.
I want to be done with guilt. I want to believe that my most important job, the most critical task, requires space. It requires quiet. It requires rest.
The most important item on my daily list is always this: to be his witness. To open my eyes and see. To open my ears and hear. And only then, to open my mouth and sing of what I have seen.
It might happen while I sit still. It might happen while I work. But it will never happen when I rush.
I want to remember that the person with the most important job of all was never in a hurry. Jesus knew there was time enough.
(photo by yours truly)
“You are my witnesses,” declares the Lord, “that I am God.
Yes, and from ancient days I am he.”
(Isaiah 43:12-13)
by Christie Purifoy | Jan 29, 2014 | children, Home, Pennsylvania, Uncategorized, Winter
I grew up without winter. For the most part, at least.
Winters in central Texas were brown and chilly, but you never knew when it might hit eighty degrees. In December, we never bothered to ask for a white Christmas. Instead, I would secretly pray that it wouldn’t be so warm we’d need the air conditioner. Even at eight years old, I found air conditioning very depressing.
As a young girl I read every one of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books repeatedly. But I read The Long Winter more than any other. It isn’t a pretty story, far from it, but something about the extreme cold and snow fed my soul. Even then.
It’s a truism that home is where you come from. Home is where you began.
I disagree. I think home is the place we’re headed. Home is the destination.
Here in my little southern corner of Pennsylvania, winter’s grip is fierce. Not Midwestern or New England fierce, to be sure, but strong enough to leave me feeling more than a little battered. More than a little caged-in.
Replacing the chickens’ frozen water with fresh, I feel like Laura Ingalls herself, but by the fourth trip out to the henhouse the literary novelty has quite worn off.
And yet I love winter.
Recently, I dropped the baby in her father’s arms and escaped out the front door with my other daughter, my firstborn. I don’t have ice skates of my own, but I carried hers. We opened the gate in the split-rail fence and we half-slid, half-stumbled down the sledding hill until we could cross the street to the frozen pond.
I stood in the snow, my toes slowly going numb, and I watched my daughter slice one foot and then the other across the ice. I said to myself, “This is Pennsylvania. This is our home.” The word Pennsylvania felt awkward. Perhaps I should blame my frozen lips. Or perhaps not. We are still learning the contours of this place and these people.
She circled the perimeter three times before I made her come in. I might lose my toes, I shouted.
My poor toes. They really did hurt, buried in snow like that, but it was a good kind of pain. Like the sharp, stinging realization that comes at the end of a very long walk. You know you’ve gone farther than you can handle, but it will be worth it. You are so close.
Three times around may have been too much. My daughter fell to her knees only part-way through our climb back up the sledding hill.
You’ll make it, I said. We’re nearly there.
Look! I can see our home from here.
*all photos taken by yours truly (with apologies to our talented, much beloved Photographer)
by Christie Purifoy | Jan 21, 2014 | Dreams, Florida, Gardening, Pennsylvania, rest, Seasons, Uncategorized, Waiting, Winter
In late December, the seed and nursery catalogs began arriving. I dove in. When I came up for air, I tried to remind myself I was planning a vegetable plot, not an eight-hundred square foot formal rose garden.
It is easy to get a little lost in a pile of seed catalogs.
These are the days for rest, both for you and your garden. Unless you live in Florida.
I’ve heard it said that southern gardeners should take their winter break in late summer. Which is sort-of true. No one can grow tomatoes in Florida in August. But, it is also not true at all. You may give your vegetable beds a break, but the grass, the weeds, and those horrible invasive vines covered in thorns do not take a break. Unless you want your house to disappear back into the primeval jungle, you had better not neglect the August garden entirely.
I only gardened in Florida for two years, but I am still recovering. As it turns out, I need a good long break from working my bit of ground.
I need a season for rest. I need a season for dreams.
Rest can be painful. A persistant ache. Dreaming hurts.
I love winter in the north, but I don’t find it easy. I long for sunshine. For warm air on the skin of my arms. For flowers and green grass and those little breezes that feel like a caress. It is a season for rest, but this means it is also a season for waiting, for desiring, for pressing hard against the blunt edges of everything you dream about but do not yet hold in your arms.
It is a season of emptiness.
True rest means returning to God. But this is not as easy nor as pretty as it sounds. It is often anguish that sends us back.
Back to the source of dreams, back to the source of every good and new thing.
Back to the only One who can renew our hope.
