The Peace of Thy Children

I'm a chronic worrier.  What's worse, I'm a chronic worrier with an imagination.  Now, in the middle trimester of my third pregnancy, those fanciful worries creep ever more deeply into my dreams.  I find myself wakened from sleep with unsettling dreams and notions.  I sometimes drift into a doze only to be startled from it by some worry, however unlikely, and while I'm aware that nothing bad is actually happening, I'm also aware that I'm not awake enough and not capable enough to stop it from happening.  Strangely enough, the latter realization unsettles me more than the former calms me.  And of course, at the center of each of these not-quite-nightmares, are my children.

I shake myself from these half-awake-mares, usually to the early light of the morning, or sometimes to the late evening darkness and the realization that I have fallen asleep on the couch again.  I rouse myself just enough to ramble a perhaps nonsensical prayer, either from my knees or as I stumble to the kitchen to make breakfast.  What does one say when taking these sorts of things to God?  'Please don't let my toddler escape into the street at any point today'?  'Please keep my kids from falling into the river that we never go near'?  Not all of my worries are quite that irrational, but the point is that there are plenty of them, some ridiculously specific and others impossibly vague.  Usually, my entreaty ends up being something along the lines of 'protect them, please, because I know I cannot.  Not on my own.'  And with that, I push most of those worries to the back of my mind and move on with my day.  Other, more mundane worries quickly replace them, and I spend the next twelve hours mostly forgetting to be grateful that the heaviest thing on my mind is how on earth to get potty training behind us once and for all.

A couple weeks ago, I started a day that way, with the heavy realization of our mortality, a plea for protection, and then transitioned to what to have for breakfast.  The hours passed and I mostly forgot the haunted dreams that had welcomed me to my morning.  After the girls were in bed and Ben and I were ready to settle in for the night, an alarm began to sound in our back hallway, where the girls slept.

A week earlier, I had detected a funny smell in the back bedroom after bathing and dressing my girls - like nail polish, but accompanied by a vague scent of burning.  I'd called the fire department but by the time they arrived to scan for gas and carbon monoxide, the smell had diminished and the air was free of  any worrisome particles.  "Do you have a carbon monoxide monitor?" the fireman had asked me.  I said I did, indicating the one mounted in the hallway.  "No, no," he said, "that's just a smoke detector."  So, feeling like a complete idiot, I had added one to my grocery cart the next day.

When I heard the high pitched alarm, days later, I assumed it was just Ben installing the new one.  I came out of the bedroom, to find it still in its packaging, though, untouched.  The back door was open and Ben, perplexed, reported the same smell I'd noticed the previous week.  It was stronger this time, but there wasn't any smoke and the alarm sounded differently than it did when something on the stove top or in the oven went badly awry.

With the back door open, the alarms grew farther and farther between, but we decided to call the fire department just the same.  They showed up and began to scan again.  Two to three parts per million in the hallway - noteworthy, but not quite dangerous yet.  The fireman opened the door behind which our girls were sleeping and leaned in, only to back out again a moment later.  "About fifty in there," he reported, and asked us to bring the kids out.

In our living room, two lady firefighters examined our girls with a pulse-oximeter, specially designed to pick up carbon monoxide levels in the blood.  Addie's read 12%, hanging at the low end of dangerous, and Ellie's was up to 17%.

After a trip to the local emergency room for further examination and monitoring, and the challenge of settling two now-rambunctious children into a hotel room, hours later, my buzzing mind slowed into sleepy reflection, just before drifting off altogether.  My kids had been in danger that night.  They had been threatened by something I could not see, hear, or smell.  The only sign had been an accompanying scent that I had, days before, been given reason to disregard as harmless, if not imagined.  The only alert to its presence had come from an alarm which I had been told by a professional was not designed to detect it.

And I had woken that morning with a rambling prayer that my children would not fall victim to some danger from which I was powerless to save them.

I have little doubt that God has a sense of humor.  Without the bawdiness or coarse irony that we often use to induce laughter, I felt that I could sense a bit of a heavenly chuckle in the whole event.  A patient whisper of  'Yes, calm down, silly girl.  These are my babies too, and I forget not my own.'

Since then, a verse of scripture that I used to love has reappeared in my mind and though I don't completely understand it in the context of this experience, I haven't been able to shake the feeling that the two are profoundly connected.  "And all thy children shall be taught of the Lord," it reads, "and great shall be the peace of thy children."  Yes, life is uncertain.  The world is dangerous - but it is not spinning out of control, simply because it is out of my control.

My mother-in-law asked me, a few days ago, whether I have had moments of panic since this incident.  I ran over the last couple of weeks in my mind, probably with a perplexed frown across my face, and to my surprise, answered, "No."  But it's true.  Even with all the day-to-day stresses, the mom-fail moments and endless tiredness that seems to plague all of us, I feel like I've regained a quiet peace that I had once and lost along the way - lost about that time I began to have people in my life, under my care, whom I could neither perfectly protect, nor stand to lose.

Reawakened is my sense that a Heavenly Father sent these children to me knowing that I might, from time to time, fasten the car seats improperly or cut the hot dogs into dangerously large pieces, or even, while taking an evening shower, cause the water heater to spew poison gas into their bedroom.  He sent them to me knowing that the world is bigger, cleverer, and more powerful than I am.  I am neither condemned by these human weaknesses and neither are my children abandoned to my care.  They are His still.  He watches over them still.

Where Happy Comes From

Hi guys, I know it's been awhile.  I always feel a sense of hesitancy to post when I've been absent for so long, like I can't write about what's on my mind at this moment without first recapping where I've been and what I've been about for the last few months.  But I feel such a warm glow this evening.  I feel such a serene happiness that it would seem a shame and a loss to keep it to myself - because these things pass.

There are a small multitude of perfect-seeming things around me just now, and it's my habit to stop, when this little flutter of light, of peace, of...something sublime for which our language has no name - and analyze my surroundings.  Somehow, it will be all the better and what's more, more tenacious, if I can pin it to its source.

But as I rattled off to myself things that I certainly am happy about - and there were many - none of them quite resonated with the buoyancy I feel.  Each was a contributor, but none was at the core.  The bubbling, vibrant, almost-walking baby wandering the house at shin-height; the little girl who clung to my shirt at bedtime and said, "I wan' to cuddle wis you.  Mother, I wan' to cuddle wis you"; the blue-gray cloud cover and dappled tawny foliage, at long last acknowledging autumn; hope breathed into a long-cherished dream; the sigh of a Friday after a particularly hectic week and the impending arrival of my husband, after a week-long absense --

And the thing upon which I finally settled, the thing which, when my mind caught hold of it, brought the unmistakable feeling of yes was the soft, measured voice of Truman G. Madsen, as he delivered lectures on the life of Joseph Smith.  The CD recording carried me down the canyon and back today, through my errands and home again.  One cannot, I believe, learn about a devoted servant of God, one who taught the Gospel so vigorously and so joyfully, and who exemplified the things which he taught, without feeling nearer to God Himself.  It made me want to pray more fervently, to serve my neighbors more cheerfully, and to search the scriptures with greater energy and curiosity.  In short, I took the opportunity to saturate my thoughts, today, in the restored Gospel of Jesus Christ and every aspect of my day was improved.

The Gospel adds vibrancy to our lives.  It liberates us to take joy in those things that we know to be most important, but in which we sometimes struggle to rejoice.  Every bright thing becomes brighter under its influence, and all true happiness is amplified.

All good things come from Jesus Christ, and He has not left us alone, to stumble in this world.  We have prophets - living prophets - to whom the Savior speaks and they speak His will.  Tomorrow and on Sunday, they will speak and we can listen.  Our lives can be saturated with this buoyant light, this abundant happiness.  This is real.

Two-Sock Life

Folding laundry the other day, I came across an all-too-familiar problem.  I think we've all encountered matchless socks in our baskets.  When I was growing up in a house full of siblings, they covered the bottom of the basket, several inches deep.  To sort through them was at once mundane and daunting.  Even though there are only three of us at my house and the single socks are only a handful after the folding has been done, it's always a vague source of frustration in the back of my mind.  If there are so few of us and it's so clear whose socks are whose and we all wear two socks every day, how do we come up short?

Perhaps the most maddening thing about it is that, as I put the unpaired few on my dryer, planning to keep a keen eye out for their matches, I know that their opposites are very likely somewhere else - in a drawer, on a shelf, or under a bed, likewise, waiting.  Disorganized as I am, I will probably never be able to round up all of those single, waiting socks, to fold them neatly together and say that my life is in order.

It's rather like my daily struggle to juggle my time just right - to read the best books, to continually learn  new skills, to keep my house clean, to provide healthy meals, to play with my daughter when she wants my attention, to actively participate in my community and in church functions, to plan and execute fun family activities, and to do a hundred other things that really ought to happen daily.  It's like the pieces of my life, which I can never quite get to fall into place the way I think the should.  It's like the woman I know I should be by now, rather than the one I meet in the mirror.  I often feel like I'll never get it together - my socks, myself, or my family.

But do you know what the funny thing is?  No matter how scattered I feel, I wake up every morning to a home that, if not tidy, is pleasant and sanitary.  Regardless of the time I never mean to waste doing mediocre activities, we always eat well.  In spite of my struggles to plan creative and memorable activities, my family rarely wants for quality time to spend together and we laugh often.  And although my laundry always comes up short of a sock or two, all of us have matching (or pretty nearly matching) socks to wear every day.

I was never good at juggling.  Others have tried to teach me and I have tried to teach myself, but even with the light, airy scarves, that take their time coming down, I could never keep all three in the air for long.  Through those misfit, lonely socks, I have found another little bit of inspiration to keep on trying.  Life is a longitudinal effort, an exercise in endurance.  I can hardly expect to wake up tomorrow as the with-it, together woman I often want to be, and to keep on being her every day and every moment, as long as I live.  I can hope and try to progress, just a little bit farther today, though, knowing that the more I strive for balance, the more the scales will be tipped in my favor.  And meanwhile, partially through my own efforts and partially through the heavenly help that I will always have and never deserve, I can trust that I and mine will always have two warm socks to wear. 

Things That Really Matter

Yesterday, someone referred me to a letter written to the public and posted on the internet regarding a statement that a well-known celebrity recently made.  The letter was brief, sarcastic, and has so far incited over two thousand comments.  While skimming through the first few of those comments, I had a nauseating realization.

My natural inclination was to reply directly to some of the responses I saw, but by the wording in many of them, I decided that the writers might be too worked up to take the things I wanted to say as anything but an insult.  Furthermore, those things would have taken a long time to write and I didn't think that would be smiled upon either.  So I'm writing some of them here.  I know that only a handful of people read my blog, at best, but I have to say something.  I have to react to this, because it's my world, too, and more specifically my country, that is reflected in that long line of discussion.

When, I wondered, did we become a society so set on violence?  When did it become so repulsive for anyone to express an opinion that is in any way contrary to our own?  Why is it that so many people, upon reading something that doesn't reflect their own views exactly, feel inclined to respond with as much venom as they can project?  I quickly lost count of the epithets, both toward the author of the letter, the subject, and toward others who had left their comments.

One highly unpopular comment following this particular document stated that "our society, as a whole, has fallen..."  If that's so, I think I can see why.  People were so up in arms about this letter and the resulting discussion that they were striking at each other in any way they could.  I don't think I've ever met a person who would look another human being in the eye and say to him or her anything of the repulsive, hateful nature of these comments.  And yet, there they were, spitting fire at complete strangers over the internet.  They might have been saying those things to their best friends or grandmothers, for all they knew.

It's not just this incident, either.  I've begun to notice that almost any article, blog post, etc. that 'goes viral' like this one, is followed by comment after comment of people jumping down one another's throats.  What is wrong with us?  Do we so thoroughly despise our neighbors?  Both among those who do and those who don't believe that we are all the children of one God, I did not imagine that we could put so little premium on the lives or feelings of others.  We are not our opinions.  We are children of God, brothers and sisters.

I know there isn't much rhyme or reason to this post.  For that, I apologize.  I was surprised to realize how upset I was at reading the letter and comments, and I had to get some of that out of my system.  So here it is, along with one final thought:  I mentioned that the letter that sparked the whole discussion was highly sarcastic.  During my time in anatomy labs and physiology lectures, it was easy to see the common thread between words like 'sarcoplasm,' and 'sarcomere.'  Just about any word containing that 'sarc' refers to muscles, flesh.  Combined with the '-asm', the meaning of the word becomes, 'to tear flesh.'  Whether or not the letter's author was right in his views, the manner in which his letter was written invited more vindictive words to follow.  It's almost Christmas, for goodness sake.  Surely the rush of adrenaline and the surge of anger that comes from attacking and being attacked cannot be worth the peace they cost us.

I know I probably sound rather high and mighty, to be writing this way.  I don't mean to be.  I recognize that my own tendency toward sarcasm is stronger and more evident than it ought to be.  Perhaps my little token of peace on earth and my gift to the gentle and loving Savior whom I commemorate this season, can be to temper those habits that hurt.  When I open my mouth, put pen to paper, or reach for my keyboard, may my words be kind.

Happiness

Last night, I had laundry to fold and Ben had things to do on the computer that were not really conducive to family time, so in a rather non-creative attempt to make it a family activity, we put on Les Miserables (1998? version), one of my favorite movies.  To me it's very much a humanist story, about the potential in every person and about the ability of the Atonement of Christ to transform us.

In all of the reflecting I've gotten to do this past month and in all of the fond memories I've found, I've also stumbled across some memories of which I'm anything but proud.  Growing up, I always knew that I was the 'difficult' child, and truly I was a piece of work.  As a teenager, I didn't sow my wild oats in the way many other teens do, but it wasn't exactly smooth sailing.  As I transitioned to adulthood, I could feel myself growing tremendously in some aspects, but I also experienced some of the most turbulent times of my life.

I've spent a lot of time looking back on those years and on the people I knew then, wondering, 'why wasn't I as good or kind or [insert virtue] as [insert name - probably your own if I've ever known you ;)]?'  Yes, I know that everyone has their own challenges, and I know that many of the people who knew me growing up, found it hard to believe that I could ever be out of line.  Nevertheless, I know my faults very well, and have known them for a long time and, like many people, I'm a harsh critic when it comes to my shortcomings.  But as I listened to the Bishop admonish Valjean, "Now don't forget, don't ever forget you've promised to become a new man," and then watched his subsequent transformation, I remembered all over again, the peace.

I remembered that, because of the tremendous gift that my Savior has given to me, and to each of us, I can let go of my regrets.  I can let go of the moments - so many of them - which I destroyed in passing.  I need not relive the unkind things I've said or done, my vanity, or my impatience.  Thanks to that gift, I am able to stop ruing that I never was the person I wanted to be, and instead can focus on becoming the person I want to be now.

This may be my last post before Thanksgiving.  In all my efforts to express gratitude this month, I will have failed if I do not acknowledge this most important thing: that every good thing - yes, every good thing in my life has come to me and comes to me still, by way of my Savior, Jesus Christ.  I too seldom mention it, but I must do it now.  His was the supreme and all encompassing gift and more than anything in my life or anything I have power to comprehend, I am grateful for that.  It has taken years for me to begin to understand what the apostle John meant, in saying that "We love Him, because He first loved us" (1 John 4:19, KJV).

I do love Him.  I am glad for the words of prophets, ancient and modern, that testify of Him, so much more powerfully than I can do.  And I am grateful for those moments of clarity, when the 'thank-you's come like a heartbeat, not for His sake, but for mine.  When I feel truly grateful to Him, it is my sustenance, and it flows over.  And that is true happiness.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Grateful-vember: Looking Forward

The other night, I found myself hurrying down a very dark, very empty closed road.  I felt haggard after a long day that had not concluded with the usual respite of my husband walking through the door in the early evening, and I was very much awake to the cold.  It seems like just a couple of days ago, I was wishing that it were jacket-weather, and suddenly, my worn hoodie was not enough to counter it.

Not in the best of moods and anxious to get to the warmth that awaited me at the road's end, I broke into an awkward, shuffling sort of run, the kind that you do when you're wearing shoes that really aren't meant even for serious walking and seem eager to jump right off your feet.  Semis and cars rolled past on my left, their headlights casting a wan, evanescent light to my feet.  I began to notice the smell of new asphalt (the reason for which I was walking in the first place), but even stronger was that dry November smell.  Drawing in and releasing that gusty cold, in steady puffs, it occurred to me, not for the first time, but for the first time in awhile, to feel grateful for my body.

I have hesitated to post this, because I know that several of my friends, some of who read this blog, don't enjoy the same health that I've taken for granted almost every day of my life.  It used to bother me that I didn't have the athletic talent to carry me to the Olympics or the miniature waist on which Hollywood sets such a high premium.  Then, of course, teenage insecurities have gradually given way to adult complacency.  Something about the cold and dark and solitude of that moment brought back the realization that not every pair of lungs can enjoy this exchange that were so casually repeating, and not every person has a pair of legs can, without adverse effects, propel them over the four-hundred meters or so that I had come.  I know this should be obvious.  It seems that all of my epiphanies these days are re-runs.

A pervasive little voice, which I mentioned a couple of days ago, whispered to me that I should not write this, that I have to right to write it.  I know that I am a stranger to pain, that physical hardship and the mental and emotional struggles that often accompany it, are at this time quite beyond my comprehension.  Still, I can't help but believe that to ignore the blessing of my health, even while I can't yet fully appreciate it, would be to belittle the physical hardships that others face and to show contempt for a very profound blessing.

Moreover, I believe in and look forward to a physical resurrection, in which our bodies, flawless and whole, will be reunited with our spirits.  Even in the health I've enjoyed, I have sensed little fore-warnings of my mortality, the promise that age will someday brittle my bones, dull my thoughts and wither my muscles.  So I celebrate the sensations I savored that night, not only as a gift, but also as a promise.  

That was the second realization to which that dark road brought me - that gratitude is not confined to the present or the past.  It is akin to hope, which casts its seeds into the future and the unknown.  I am grateful for the promises in which I hope and for whose sake I am learning to live patiently and happily now.

Grateful-vember: Making a Choice

I remember seeing on Facebook last year, that a lot of my friends had decided to do a 'grateful November' challenge, every day posting, in their 'status' bars, something for which they felt grateful.  I thought that it was such a great idea, but somehow - maybe even subconsciously - I felt like I couldn't participate, because I hadn't thought of it until the third or fourth day of the month.  This year, I decided not to let that hold me back.  It's November 4th, and I'm going to make an effort to post (at least several times) this month about things for which I am grateful.

Last weekend, one of my best friends in the whole world came to see me.  While she was here, we went to the Snowflake Arizona (LDS) Temple.  It was a marvelous experience and I got to revisit a realization that I had forgotten.  That is that happiness is a choice.  At some times, it's a more difficult choice to make than at others, but it is a decision.  Furthermore, happiness and gratitude go hand in hand.  They are inextricably linked.  At least for me, this has been the case.  I have noticed that I am happiest in the moments in which I can see just how blessed I am; in which I realize that someone has done for me what I needed and could not do for myself; in which I decide to enjoy what I have and to feel glad that all that has happened has brought me to where I am today.

So today I am grateful to be in this place at this time, living this life.  I am not regretting that I haven't traveled the world, that I am not prettier or more educated, or that I don't have more friends than I do.  I came, utterly vulnerable, as a stranger into a strange land - and I don't just mean to this Somewhere - but when I have hungered, I have been fed.  When I have thirsted, my thirst has been quenched.  As I have walked into the darkness, I have been led.  I never could have imagined, a few years ago, what my life would look like in the latter end of 2013, nor that I would or could like it so well.  I am grateful for the gift of agency,  by which I can choose happiness in seeing the divine hand that has given me everything from the air I breathe to the home enjoy to the family I love.     

The Make-Over: Ceaseless and Sorrowless

The other major change I made to the blog was, obviously, the web address.  After I changed the name, I thought that I really out to have a new web address too.  Why not, right?  I wanted something to match the type of things I hope to write about as well as the name.  I wanted something to remind me of why I started blogging in the first place.  But, alas, I couldn't come up with anything I liked, much less anything that hadn't been taken.  So I have up.

As is the way with these types of things, though, the right idea eventually found me.  I've found that brainstorming is only really productive if you have some clouds in your brain to begin with, maybe a little wind.  I don't know how it is for anyone else, but I can seldom will myself to be creative on the spot and come up with good results.

But where was I?  Ah, yes - the address.  The bolt of inspiration that caught up to me after I had given up on it.

When I was in college, the LDS Institute held weekly devotionals wherein a guest speaker spent an hour or so with a chapel full of students, offering motivation and inspiration (or trying to do so, at least.  One of the first devotional addresses I can remember involved the speaker saying something like "You know you're in college when you spend $200 for a book you don't want, don't read it, and sell it back for $7.  Neener-neener.").  It was in one of these devotionals that I was first introduced to Arthur Edgar O'Shaughnessy's "Ode."

I was working on getting into nursing school at that point, but I was also very interesting in poetry.  I set out to find the full poem, fell in love with it, and committed it to memory.  You probably know the one I'm talking about - "We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams..."  (It is not a Willy Wonka original.  Don't be deceived).

The seventh stanza reads:

"But we, with our dreaming and singing,

Ceaseless and sorrowless, we!

The glory about us clinging

Of the glorious futures we see,

Our souls with high music ringing:

O men!  It must ever be

That we dwell, in our dreaming and singing

A little apart from ye."

It seemed like the perfect companion for a title like "Tales from Far Away."  My life has diverged from all of my friends' and family's.  We are not far, and yet apart.  Not separated, and yet irreversibly divided.  And wherever we are, time moves on, ceaseless.  We have sorrows, but they are not what define us. 

I married a man who loves to sing.  He is always singing something and he sings sunshine into our home.  If anyone asks, we are out here in the middle of our lovely Somewhere, living our dreams.

The Make-Over: Tales From Far Away

Ever since my blogging identity crisis, I've felt the need, as I begin again to try blogging on a regular basis, to give the page a make-over.  Anyone who read my earliest posts when I first began writing them will have noticed that almost everything has changed: my background, blog title, self-intro blurb, and now my web address.  Some of those things will probably be subject to change on a semi-regular basis, but getting a new title and address felt like kind of an extreme, though merited change, so I decided to try to add some explanation.

The original blog title and web address were the products of boredom.  I was in a new home, relatively far from my family and friends, had applied for work and been hired, but had to wait for weeks for the background check to come through, and had no means of transportation to explore my new home town.  On top of that, I was still in the beginning of my pregnancy and was still feeling somewhat...shall we say newly pregnant?  Once, during a phone conversation to my mom, as I moaned and groaned about my lot in life, she said, "Why don't you start a blog?  That'll keep you busy."

So I did and I used the first name and web address that came into my head, unwittingly turning my last name into what sounded like a religion or philosophy.  When we were contemplating moving here, I settled on the name 'Tales from Far Away.'  In a way, that seems silly, since one of my best friends from high school is now living over a thousand miles further from home than I am.  Another is living across the Atlantic, and one of my best friends from college has been travelling across Europe on business.  What right have I, a measly 500 miles from every place I have ever lived, to claim the description 'far away?'

First, there is the fact that, among both my family and Ben's, we are the outlier, not counting his sister who is serving a mission in Taiwan, of course.  We communicate with the family via email, phone calls, and internet video chatting, but when it comes to family gatherings, ours are the faces that will almost always be absent.  We're out here having our own little adventures and doing our best not to focus on the ones we know we'd enjoy if Ben's job had kept us closer to home.

Then, there's the feeling I've had almost since we were married, and which has certainly grown stronger since then, that when we got married, in a lot of ways, we got up and left the world behind.  Most of our former associations with friends and acquaintances of single life faded away or disappeared altogether.

What's more, we've changed.

I used to imagine that, as a single girl, I was always standing at a crossroads.  I could go in any one of several directions, or in other words, I could develop and encourage any one of several inclinations, and each of them might be equally good.  In marrying Ben, however, I chose on of those roads to follow.  He did the same.  Where our inclinations matched, where our desires and tendencies harmonized, there we walked.  Had we married different people, we might each be different, to some extent.

I am, all the time, pleasantly surprised as I realize where our marriage, and now our family, has taken us.  I keep seeing things in Ben, in the way he treats me, or just in the way he thinks and acts, that I never thought to look for in a prospective spouse when I was dating.  They are things I didn't even realize I wanted.  It's funny how two distinct and separate people can also be, in so many ways, a single entity.

So I guess that's the truest reason I can think of for the blog's name.  Ben and I are far away in the same way that every marriage takes partners far away.  I'm hoping to give the people I love a few glimpses into our little world.

Sunshine

I'm generally a rain and snow type of girl.  There's precious little I enjoy quite like a good storm and a window through which to watch it.  I've never been very heat tolerant and my un-tannable skin is just as happy to spend most of its time under cloud cover as well.  But yesterday, I spent a few minutes sitting out on my uncovered front porch, leaning back against the side of the house, and soaking in a clear, blue sky.  The cool of autumn has finally gotten here and had sunken itself into my toes and as I listened to the distant sound of my daughter wailing in her crib, I found myself thinking about the sun and thinking, 'this is perfect.'

Because I have to admit that yesterday was just one of those days.  There were no peaceful naps at the regular times or at any others, for that matter, and subsequently, the bed remained unmade, the laundry was still in haphazard piles all over the floor, (not to mention  a load more wadded up in the dryer, the door of which I didn't even get around to closing until late afternoon or early evening) the clean and dry dishes didn't move from their perch on my counter top, and I could go on.  On top of everything, I had a grouchy girl who insisted that she needed to be held at all times and I was expecting company for dinner that night.

Really, it was one of those days where you almost break down and burst into tears, half because you don't know what to do, and half because you want to, because crying would be a good way of letting off some steam and of convincing yourself that you should cuddle up with a good book and some hot chocolate.  I didn't even realize that I was at that point until about three in the afternoon, right in the midst of another failing nap.

Then began a series of tender mercies - I don't know what else to call them - or at least, then I began to notice them.  The first thing that really shook me out of feel-sorry-for-myself mode was a text I got that read "Hkmhujiiiohjjkkllppp" (I pulled out my phone to make sure that I was quoting it right).  I soon found out that a one-year-old, sixteen miles away, had just sent her first text.

I also got a text from my husband about that time.  Actually, I got a few.  I usually don't get text from him while he's at work, mostly because he's not so big on texting, so it was a special treat to get one from him, telling me that he loved me more than his sandwich.

And finally, there was the package that I remembered in the car, that my mom had sent and which I hadn't gotten a chance to open in the hurry of putting a certain little someone down for a nap.  She had told me that she would be sending us some odds and ends of ours that she had found, as well as a Halloween costume, but it's always fun to open a package, right?  Even if you already know what's in it.  Inside, I found a costume, a Halloween decoration, the aforementioned odds and ends, and then a little bag of candy, a grown-up treat that she must have known I'd be too cheap to buy, and a souvenir she had thought to get for me on a recent trip back east.

It's amazing how little things like that can give me the nudge I need to make or break my day.  As I listened to the continual sound of 'I'm still  not asleep, Mom, and I'm still not happy about it,' began browning hamburger and opening a can of pumpkin, I realized that I was suddenly feeling rather grateful.  It's a heavy feeling sometimes, not heavy like carrying a sack of rocks around, but like the heaviness of a thick wool blanket that makes you feel secure and takes your body heat to feed it back to you.  It's a delicious, heaviness, a be-still heaviness.

During moments like that, I realize that God isn't so far away from us.  It was one of those times when I thought, 'if I were a poet, this would be a good time to write a poem,' one of those times when, if I didn't feel such a heavy stillness, I would have sung all of my favorite songs.  And I thought, 'I'm thankful for little things, like texts.  And candy.  And my mom.  And pumpkin.  And my non-napping daughter.  And families.  And sunshine.'