A Letter to My Younger Self

A Letter to My Younger Self

*

I recently had the privilege of joining Susie Davis on her Dear Daughters podcast. In preparation for our conversation, Susie asked if I would pen a letter to my younger self. You can listen to our full interview right here. The letter I shared with Susie and her listeners is printed for you below.

*

Dear Twelve-year-old Christie reading her copy of The Secret Garden for the third time,

I know that book is filling your heart with a sweet but painful ache. I know you want a garden of your own.

I remember how those descriptions of an English springtime blooming with daffodils sent you straight outside into your father’s Texas garden. But I also remember what you found there: mosquitoes, fire ants, scorching heat, and a humidity so thick it took your breath away.

You gave up. You did not ask your Dad “for a bit of earth” as Mary had in the story. You would never grow beautiful things. Didn’t have what it takes, apparently. Best to stay indoors and read another book and another book and another book until the Texas summer finally gave way to the first cold front of November.

Dear girl, so hungry for beauty. Keep reading those books. Keep dreaming of daffodils with yellow trumpets through you have never seen them with your own eyes. That desire for a bit of earth has been planted in you by your Maker. It is good no matter that it hurts so much right now. Don’t stuff it down too far. Don’t see it as a sign of your own failure. Nurture it with stories. Feed it with the roses your mother cuts from your father’s garden and places in a jam jar on the kitchen table. Enjoy the Texas wildflowers in March, those fields of red and blue. They are every bit as beautiful as Mary’s secret garden, though they need no care from you.

One day you will understand why you read that book so many times, and you will give thanks for the ground beneath your grownup feet.

You will understand that this is no ordinary ground. It is ground prepared for you–prepared for your spade and your watering can, your dreams and your desires–years before you knew it would be given to you.

And when the daffodils you planted bloom by the hundreds you will sing a song of praise to the God who calls forth music from yellow-petaled trumpets.

Yours,

Christie

A Summer Manifesto

A Summer Manifesto

I wanted to write something about these long, summer days: how they are suddenly upon us, how they leave me laughing but also desperately trying to catch my breath. Then I did a little digging in my blog archives and realized I’d already written the post I was imagining. No need to reinvent the wheel, then. Summer is easy like that.

In slightly revised form, here is my summer manifesto. Every word just as true as it was one year ago.

 

 

Summer days are here: cool in the morning, a little too warm by afternoon, and every window open.

We wake early but find that the sun has already beat us to it. These are the longest days, and they start without us. I sip my morning coffee and make my list. How is it possible to feel so behind at 6:30 in the morning?

Summer to-do lists are like none other:

Pick the snap peas while they’re still tender. Cut the sweet peas before they wilt. Visit the u-pick berry farm. Make freezer jam. Write that magazine story due tomorrow. Carve a dent, at least, in the email inbox. Write that check and mail it. Help the boys catch fireflies.

Summer priorities are topsy-turvy. Ripening strawberries and fat peas are things of urgency, but I’ve forgotten where I left my laptop. Was it two days ago, I last used it? There’s an important professional conversation I need to have, but I’ve missed the phone call twice. The first time, I was at the creek with the kids. The second, I was picking cherries.

An afternoon storm rolls in, the kind of summer storm that is all sound, little fury, and I think Lord, I love summer.

The boys start fighting (again), and I pray, Lord, let me survive the summer.

*

Summer days are so long, we have more than one second chance.

Here is one, and here is another. We explode in anger. We apologize. I make them hug. One shrugs. One runs away. We laugh. And we do it all again, three or four times. I maybe cry once, and then I tell my kids how I used to fight so terribly with my sisters I made my own mother cry.

Summer is crying mothers, and fighting kids; summer is fat, sweet strawberries, and lightning crashing like a cymbal on your head.

Summer is more, and more, and more.

Summer is magic.

*

Summer days run fast and hard until evening. Then the summer sun slows, almost stops, and you can hardly tell it’s sinking. Summer evenings taste like forever. I could finish that to-do list if I wanted, but urgency fades in the evening. Why didn’t I realize sooner? These are the longest days, and there is time enough.

Swift, swift times flies, but still there is enough for what matters: porch rockers, bubble wands, strawberries, one last visit to the new tree with a watering can.

The kids watch a movie and stay up too late. You and I walk in the meadow we made when you decided to stop mowing the grass.

There is time enough.

Stop running.

Summer is here. Why don’t we sit a while?

 

 

Tell me, I’d love to hear. What is your summer manifesto?

 

A Winter Reset (and Giveaway)

A Winter Reset (and Giveaway)

 

Winter came early, settled in to stay, and shows no signs of an early leave-taking.

By Friday, we will have counted forty days since Christmas. The strength of the sun has grown, but I do miss those cheerful days of twinkle-lights and candy canes.

Still, I would not unwind time. Onward and upward. Spring beckons, though it is only a light far down a very long tunnel.

Now, we mark the traditional halfway point of winter. Friday is Candlemas, the day when candles were blessed for the dark days of winter that remained, the day when we remember Christ presented at the Temple and sing Zechariah’s song:

… the dawn from on high shall break upon us, to shine on those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death, and to guide our feet into the way of peace.

Peace is a way, a path, a choice.

I am sorry to say that peace often looks anything but peaceful when we begin to choose it. In order to seek peace, we must sometimes fix our eyes on the light we only barely see, far down a very long tunnel.

Peace is a wholeness, a completeness, and a rightness. We seek peace and we pursue it when we walk toward–not away–from those things in our homes, our neighborhoods, and our world that are broken, incomplete, and wrong.

We are peacemakers, not peacetakers out to grab whatever we can for ourselves.

The good news is that we seek that which we have already received.

Jesus said,

Peace I leave with you, my peace I give you.

We cultivate seeds planted in us long, long ago.

 

 

Halfway through this long, dark season, I desperately need to remember all that is special and good about winter. Things like long books, warm fires, garden dreams, geraniums on the windowsill, and so much more.

I need a winter reset.

If you feel the same, I think this gift will help.

The third installment is finally here: it’s a Winter Giveaway!

When I first imagined the book that eventually became Roots and Sky, I pictured an old-fashioned treasure, something like the books I seek out in thrift stores and used bookstores. I thought my stories would be interspersed with seasonal tips and recipes and nostalgic pen-and-ink illustrations.

Almost as soon as I began writing, I realized that the story I needed to tell was simpler and leaner. Those first four seasons at Maplehurst were more quiet and watchful than busy and industrious, and the book needed to reflect that.

But the idea of offering more–seasonal stories, tips, recipes, and beautiful illustrations–has never gone away.

Last summer we celebrated five years of cultivating home in this Victorian red brick farmhouse.

I can’t think of a better way to mark that anniversary than by finally giving you the more I imagined so long ago. In fact, I plan to give you more (and more, and more, and more). I have four gifts planned, each one arriving with a new season.

In collaboration with the talented designer and illustrator Jennifer Tucker of Little House Studio, I’ve created four winter-themed pages from that book of my dreams.

They are free for every one of my email subscribers to download and print.

One comes from my kitchen, two from the garden, and one from my bookshelves. Each page offers something practical and beautiful wrapped up in my own lyrical point of view.

I’m planning to print and frame mine, but they’ll do just as well tacked to a bulletin board or tucked into a garden journal or recipe box. Feel free to share this post with friends who might like to subscribe and print their own.

Simply click the subscribe box below, enter your email address, and a confirmation email will be sent straight to you. Confirm your address, and you’ll be taken to the link in order to claim your download.

If you are already a subscriber, check your inbox. Your link should be waiting for you.

Here are two things to remember:

One: TWO WEEKS from today, the offer expires, and the prints will no longer be available.

Two: Spring won’t keep us waiting forever. Look for my spring giveaway in April.

 

Gardenbound: A Maplehurst Tour

Gardenbound: A Maplehurst Tour

 

A garden, unlike a house, is never still. It is not an object but a moment. To observe a garden, one must catch it like a butterfly in a net (but please do let it go again. Beauty cannot be preserved or it ceases to be itself).

 

 

When I give someone a tour of the gardens here at Maplehurst, I catch myself crying, “Oh, if only you had seen the daffodils that bloomed last week.” I am like a mother pouring over baby photos while the child who was that baby tugs at my hand, begging me to play another round of Candyland.

My heart inclines towards nostalgia, and I am easily tangled in the past, but today’s garden is only for today. I must pay attention or I’ll miss it, and there are no encores, no second chances.

Why keep a garden? Why grow flowers? The arguments against it are persuasive. A garden will keep you tethered because to plant something is to make a promise: I will clear the weeds from around you, I will bring you water when the sky turns dry. I will not walk away.

But there are worse things than being kept at home because someone there needs us. The word “homebound” alludes to difficult and heartbreaking realities, but it also speaks of the way home can hold us and keep us steady. And to live as one “bound for home” is to live as a pilgrim sure of the welcome that waits for us.

 

 

Right now this garden flows as swiftly as a swollen river. By mid-summer, its movement will have slowed to a trickle, though it never does stop.

The gift of a garden is that it brings movement and change to the still point that is our home.

In spring, I lift my eyes from washing dishes, feeding children, folding laundry, and all those tasks that keep me tied, through love and obligation, to this place. I lift them toward the open window, and I say,

Look! The world is new again.

 

 

Elizabeth and I are homebound. She, a writer of poetry and prose, is bound to Mersea, a 1904 white Victorian nestled in the historic district of a South Carolina shrimping village. I am bound to Maplehurst, a red-brick farmhouse built by Pennsylvania Quakers in 1880. We are both writers, wives, and mothers, but nearly twenty years and hundreds of miles lie between us.

Elizabeth and I exchanged a few “homebound” letters over Lent. The nature of a letter is to communicate over a distance, but the season of Lent introduced other distances – there was the space between winter and spring, the break between longing and fulfillment, and the chasm, so like a tomb, between death and new life. But what is Lent, after all, but a kind of long homecoming? It is a practice of return and a way of erasing distance.

Those who go out weeping, carrying seed to sow, will return with songs of joy, carrying sheaves with them (Psalm 126:6).

For Elizabeth and I, Easter has meant trading the distance of letter writing for the intimacy of a visit, first with a home tour and today with a tour of the garden. 

Here is our invitation to Elizabeth’s garden at Mersea.

 

 

Five Life-Changing Lessons From The Garden

Lesson One:

The weeds come back first.

Don’t be discouraged. Start weeding. Keep waiting.

And, especially, keep your eyes open.

DSC_6556_1

Lesson Two:

Even your least-favorite colors are beautiful after a long winter. Neon-yellow forsythia, I’m looking at you.

twirl

Lesson Three:

After a long winter spent with books, it takes time to reacquaint yourself with the world outside your door. Like the two-year-old, you may at first mistake a bumble bee for a “porcupine.”

helper

Lesson Four:

Don’t put off till tomorrow the cleanup you can do today. Especially because, tomorrow, all those brush piles will be edged with poison ivy.

DSC_8760_1

Lesson Five:

The garden asks you to do and be. It is important to cut back all the hydrangeas that bloom on new wood, but it is just as important to sit in a green patch memorizing the stripes on a purple crocus.

*

What’s growing in your bit of earth?

 

(P.S. These springtime photos were taken by my sister, Kelli Campbell, last year. If you’d like to keep up with the spring just beginning at Maplehurst, you can find my own images on Instagram.)

Pin It on Pinterest