by Christie Purifoy | Jun 14, 2018 | children, Family, Life Right Now, Summer, Uncategorized
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?
by Christie Purifoy | Jul 18, 2017 | Books, guest post, Home, Uncategorized
I wrote a whole book about the longing for home and the painful (but beautiful) process of homecoming, and yet, five years after moving to Maplehurst and more than a year after Roots and Sky was published, I find I have so much more to say.
And so much more to learn.
Bekah DiFelice is teaching me and inspiring me. I feel as if I could have written every word of this post myself, and yet her experience of moving, moving, and moving on again has given her wisdom and a perspective that can benefit us all. Myself, included.
She shares some of her story below, but I encourage you to pick up a copy of her just-released book, Almost There: Searching for Home in a Life on the Move.
I’m not a gardener, nor do I possess any talent for coaxing green things to grow, but I am a person who is curious about roots. I’ve often wondered what it takes for them to wind through the ground beneath me and make me feel settled, at home.
Nearly a decade ago, I married a handsome Marine who promised to show me the world.
Then he moved us to Yuma, Arizona.
Ever since that first departure, my family and I have moved often, rearranging the same furniture in different houses, coaching new acquaintances on the correct pronunciation of our last name.
In a life on the move, I have found that a person can be homesick for many things besides an address. You can long for a relationship, hobby, or talent that you’ve lost or tabled for a time. You can be homesick for a version of yourself that existed before you changed jobs or had babies or decided on a whim to try out bangs.
Any source of stability can unexpectedly expire, so I think we’re all “on the move,” in one way or another. We are moveable gardens and transplanted roots, all asking what—and where—home is now and what else it could be.
My favorite quote from Christie’s book Roots and Sky is that homecoming is a “process rather than a moment.” It takes some time. Because to establish home is to strain for it. Home is not a passive landing pad, but the place where we battle for roots.
For a long time, I wondered if all this physical transience was detrimental to my root system. I wondered if I fostered shallow relationships or a short attention span; if I had an extra-large appetite for elsewheres, since new possibility was just one move away.
But when I evaluated our mobile life, I didn’t find a touristy sense of ease and detachment. I found, instead, that transience motivated a muscular strain for settledness. It takes a lot of work to transplant, after all. And this work is for our good.
This makes Jesus’ message in John 15 all the more alluring, where he refers to himself as a vine and you and me as the branches.
‘Live in me,’ he says, “Make your home in me just as I do in you.’ (John 15:4)
The work of the branches is to live in companionship with Christ so that they may enjoy a good and abundant life (John 10:10). But the best life doesn’t necessarily mean the lightest or most carefree, which is why the same passage also talks about pruning, the trimming down of branches. God cultivates us by occasionally clipping at our edges so there’s room and reason for us to expand into greater growth. Vines are spreading plants, after all. They exist on the move. And when they’re healthy, when they’re challenged and pruned, they know how to take new territory and to live well in it.
Whether you’re someone who is on the move in identity, career, purpose, or geography, movement has a way of encouraging resilience by way of hardship. It spurs the pursuit of community, clarity, and hopefully God himself as tethers of stability we reach for when other kinds expire.
Although transience doesn’t always train us in the grit of staying in one location, it does train us in the grit of remaining in Christ, in sinking our roots into Someone who interprets for us what to do with all these bits of temporary.
I believe that God is fostering the fullness of life within by placing us in contexts that require us to tenaciously remain in him. So it is a sort of consolation, or maybe even a source of deep gratification, that the distinct stressors of a life on the move are the same tensions that train and grow us.
The work of homecoming clarifies the destination our roots are straining towards.
Bekah DiFelice loves strong coffee, her home state of Colorado, and turning strangers into friends. She is a passionate gatherer of people, mediocre cook, and writer who has a lot to say about only a few things. You can find her at BekahDiFelice.com, where she shares her story of discovering pieces of home in the most unlikely places. Her book, Almost There: Searching for Home in a Life on the Move, is available now.
by Christie Purifoy | Jun 5, 2017 | Books, Food, Gardening, Giveaway, Home, Pennsylvania, Roots and Sky, Seasons, Summer, Uncategorized
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.
This summer we will celebrate 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.
First, summer.
In collaboration with the talented designer and illustrator Jennifer Tucker of Little House Studio, I’ve created four summer-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, one from my flower garden, one from my vegetable 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 print their own.
Simply input your email address to the subscribe box below, and an email with a link for the download will be sent straight to you. If you are already a subscriber, check your inbox. Your link should be waiting for you.
Here are two things to remember:
One: Summer is fleeting, and so is this gift. Two weeks from today, the offer expires, and the prints will no longer be available.
Two: Autumn follows fast on summer’s heels, and my fall pages should appear some time in September.
P.S. Because I couldn’t decide which I loved best – full color or black-and-white – I’m giving you both. I am also giving you the recipe page in two color options. Feel free to choose one or print all. Enjoy!
by Christie Purifoy | Mar 21, 2017 | Dreams, Home, Homebound, Hope, Lent, Scripture, Seasons, Spring, Uncategorized, Waiting
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. This season, as winter turns toward spring and Lent leans toward Easter, Elizabeth and I are writing letters, she beneath the pines and pecans, I beneath the hemlocks and maples. We will reflect together on our homebound journeys. We will explore the bonds of love and faithfulness that tie us, and not always easily, to these particular places and to the people sheltered within them. Please join us for an epistolary exploration of love, loss, and restoration.
Read Elizabeth’s letter of March 9 here. My response is below.
March 21, 2017
from my armchair near the window, with its view of soggy earth and snow
Dear Elizabeth,
I, too, have been traveling, though I have not left this place.
My feet were firmly planted in spring. The early daffodils were up and nodding their heads, and the giant magnolia tree was a haze of pink. The two forsythia shrubs in our front lawn were beginning to pop, like yellow corn kernels tossed in a hot pan. But last Tuesday the wind picked up and hurled snow, then ice, at our window glass. It’s so loud, the kids said. And just like that I found myself in a winter world. And not winter’s last gasp, either, but winter as dark and ice-locked as any day in January.
Today, the calendar says spring, but the snow is retreating slowly, and the growing tips of the daffodils look bruised. They remind me of that proverb once bitten, twice shy. They look as hesitant as I feel. A few new projects beckon, and I have felt some old dreams stirring, as if their time draws near, but can I trust the weather?
You write of seeds. You say they are worth the wait. Yet even the seeds I planted in those warmer February days now trouble me. I have a long row of sweetpea seedlings on my kitchen windowsill. They are overgrown. White roots are beginning to worm their way out of the bottoms of the tall peat pots. Yet I cannot plant them out while snow is on the ground. I worry they will end up feeding the compost heap rather than scrambling up the lattice prepared for them in the garden.
Because it is Lent, I have been pausing throughout each day with a prayer book. Recently, my prayer book reminded me that March 25 will mark nine months before Christmas. On this day, the church celebrates the message the angel Gabriel brought to Mary. We remember how she said yes though she did not understand how such an impossible thing could come to be. How right it seems to recall, in these dark and muddy days of earliest spring, the seed that was planted within one young woman. The refrain for this week’s prayers is this: “On this day the Lord has acted; we will rejoice and be glad in it.”
I can remember a spring morning five years ago. I woke with those same words already dancing through my head: “This is the day … let us rejoice and be glad in it.” The words startled me. I was living then in a wilderness place, desperate for hope, desperate for newness, and praying for a home, yet it seemed, if the words in my head could be trusted, that something had shifted.
The following day, Jonathan returned from a business trip. He told me he had been offered a job in Pennsylvania. We could move as soon as we found a home, and the home we found not long after was Maplehurst.
First, there is the seed, planted in darkness. Only later, new life, miraculous, impossible.
Sorrow and joy do co-exist, as you wrote to me, and that is never more true than while we walk this sharp edge between winter and spring.
When I began this letter, the sky was low and gray. Now it is striped with blue, and I can see the shadows of the maple trees. Perhaps hope is not such a foolhardy thing. The sun seems to say, This. This is the day.
with grace, peace, and, yes, hope,
Christie
Maplehurst
by Christie Purifoy | Apr 19, 2016 | Family, God, grief, Home, Roots and Sky, Uncategorized
A few years ago, soon after our move to Maplehurst, I wrote this prayer on a three by five index card:
Lord, please make a way for my extended family to gather more often.
I added it to the small stack I keep in my Bible, and I regularly remembered it in prayer. The paper is softer now, the ink a little bit smeared.
Soon, my husband and I and our four children will fly to Texas for Shawn’s burial. Since the accident in January, my daughter and I have traveled to Hawaii, my husband has made two trips to be with my sister and her kids in Kansas City, we sent our older daughter and son on their own to visit grandparents and cousins. And now we fly to Texas.
My prayer has been answered, but the answer to my prayer is loss.
*
I have not visited my hometown in a decade. My children have either never been or have no memory of the place, but because Jonathan and I and my sister and Shawn share the same Texas roots, we will gather there. We will gather with my parents and siblings, my nieces and nephews, my in-laws, and with Shawn’s family. We will be joined by my father’s west Texas family, by my mother’s California family, by high school friends and college friends and childhood church friends.
In Roots and Sky, I write:
“I have long wondered if home is the place from which we come or the place we are headed. The estrangement I felt from my surroundings as a child growing up in Texas has always meant that I tend to see home as my end and not my beginning.”
This is a return to our beginnings. I suspect that whatever I find there, I must bring it back with me, a little something extra tucked into my carry-on.
Home is our present and our past. Perhaps, it is time to make my own past welcome at Maplehurst.
*
That index card is still tucked into the back page of my Bible. I wanted to feel angry when I read it again, but I felt, instead, some mix of fear, awe, and resignation. I believe the prayer came from God as much as the answer, so I cannot muster up any anger, just as I never, truly, mustered up that prayer.
I only received it. Repeated it. Submitted to it.
Instead of anger, I feel compassion for that other me who prayed without seeing, without understanding, but with hope. I believe the prayer was good, and so I believe that the answer is good.
It is also terrible.
*
Twelve men died in those helicopters, but there will be only 9 coffins. We are all dust, and we all return to dust, but some are buried in earth and others are dust in the sea.
Some part of Shawn has been returned to us, and so we are lucky. We are blessed.
And what are blessings but those gifts that are hardest to receive?
Like this opportunity to gather. This opportunity to go home again. This chance to say hello to so many.
For this gift, this chance to plant our last goodbye in familiar dirt, we say thank you.
And we say, have mercy on us, O Lord, have mercy on us.
