spring and thoughts of past and future present

I. Spring

For the second Saturday this year, the temperature has provided enough warmth for a girl to sit on the back deck in her bare feet enjoying the spring fragrances spicy on the breeze. The apple blossoms have fallen off the old orchard trees across the street (our old rule of thumb for the time to put away shoes and run around barefoot), everything that bears foliage has exploded with green, and the overcast sky and the rising purpose in the wind speak of thunderstorms to come.

But for now it's mild, on the edgy side of restful, the kind of weather that makes you glad to be awake and in the present, and I am profoundly enjoying the new possibility of sipping coffee and blogging on the deck.

This week seemed at the same time impossibly good and impossibly long. Every day brings unlooked-for blessings, sudden ambushes of joy, and yet the time moves at so slow a pace as to stretch the days out in slow muscularity like bread dough under the rolling pin. My whole being waits for something, and, like the building intensity in the lakeborn breeze, events are moving toward some kind of arrival.

While I wait I have plenty of occupations. My favorite at the moment is my new laptop. The last time I had one I sported a freshman ID at Grove City. That laptop came to me from the college as included in my tuition, which was great, except that it was a Compaq and widely recognized even at the time as barely worth the effort of maintaining it. Its battery died and it eventually reached the point where it would shut down without warning even plugged in, but it held the bulk of the terrible writings of my youth, and I kept it for the nostalgic value.

As we discussed my returning to the parental nest a couple of months ago, Dad wanted to borrow it for his IT buddy to restore. We have wireless at the house, and Dad has his own laptop, and Mom has the PC, and, being a rather territorial bunch ("Hey -- why did you drink out of my mug? This one is yours") we thought it would be a good idea for me to have my own computer. Reluctantly I handed over the old Compaq, telling Dad, "It's in reeeeally sad shape, Pop, I don't know what he can do with it." "We'll figure something out," he said.

Money being what it is in our family (it turns out that everyone benefits from my temporary return home; Mom's getting fewer hours at work and the money I bring in that doesn't go toward my debt can help with the household groceries, which salves my wounded pride a bit), I didn't pick up on the catch phrase. "We'll figure something out" always means "I'll find a way to get you the best thing possible and damn the cost because you need this and I love you." So I shouldn't have been surprised on Thursday night when Dad handed me a computer-shaped box and said, "We got it back."

"Sweet!" I pulled it open, and stopped. A shiny blue thing gleamed under a thin veil of styrofoam. "Wait...this isn't my computer," I said. I looked at the box cover and then lifted the styrofoam. "Dad, this isn't...it's not my brand." I looked at him. He looked confused. I looked even more confused. As I lifted the oh-so-light little laptop out of the box, I suddenly got it and asked, "What did you do?" He started grinning, Mom was lighting up her end of the living room with her smile, and suddenly I was like a little kid at Christmas, opening the cover and squealing over everything. "Dad...is that Webcam? I HAVE WEBCAM! I can Skype!!!"

I thought his cheeks would split. Hugs were given all around, and then I curled up on the couch clutching my new goody.

My parents are the best. They got all vague when I asked them what I owe them, so I guess I'll have to work it off with acts of indentured servitude, if only to make myself feel better. I can't get over the luxury of checking my email in bed, or blogging on the deck, or looking up "Alsatian" at the dining room table (which breed Mom knew and I didn't). From sheer force of habit I keep finding myself gravitating toward Mom's PC in the corner of the living room, and then laughing at how confusedly anchorless I feel when I can carry my laptop all over the house, as if I weren't really online unless the computer is too large to go anywhere.

So that was the highlight of my list of good things this week. I also had plenty of phone calls and emails from old friends, and yesterday a really fabulous conversation with my boss about politics and the church. The weather has been splendid, I'm trying out a new fun brand of makeup in preparation for the browns and bronzes of summer, and my grading job starts paying at the beginning of June. And next week I will be at Meg and Phillip's! Road trip, good music with the windows rolled down, the familiar interminability of the Ohio turnpike, and time spent at last with my chosen family. (I can't wait to see my niece. I told Meg the other week, "Ohhh, Meg, I have so many words to teach her!" "No you don't," she said. "Oh, but they're really memorable and short," I said. "Well, she already thinks that 'sit' is 'shit,'" Meg said, "so I don't know how much damage you can do.")

Ahh...everything is so beautiful here in early summer. It's supposed to be all rainy and cold the rest of the weekend (harumph harumph), but yesterday and today have been simply enchanting. I've taken to driving home from work along Route 5, which parallels the lake, instead of the more straightforward routes that would get me home faster but don't bear Route 5's scenic charm. It's the prettiest highway drive around here, with the blue of sky and lake and the browns and greens of earth -- but at this time of the year, mostly greens. And the smells. Makes you glad to be alive.

II. Thoughts of Past and Future Present

Mixed in with all my gladnesses and gratitudes (oo, a little sunshine!) are reflections on my current state of affairs and what I'm going to do with my future. Mom helped me with the ongoing ordeal of cleaning the rest of my crap out of the trailer last night, and I mentioned how much better it's been for me not living alone -- really, people prone to clinical depression who are in recovery from prolonged trauma shouldn't live alone; it gives the darkness too much sway -- and how sometimes I lapse into troll living because I just don't care. She pointed out what I remembered even as she said it -- that I kept a beautiful home in my apartment in South Bend. "The difference is that you were happy there," she said, threading my grandmother's awful lace curtains back onto the curtain rods. "You liked your whole life." "Yeah, it's been awhile since that," I said from where I leaned against the doorjamb.

So I've been turning that over in my mind, trying to be gentle with myself as I am generally not wont to do and view myself reasonably, and I journaled this morning about the various factors then that contributed to my general happiness with life back then, which manifested itself in a happily clean home. Because, being me, I have been worrying that perhaps I'm just a shitty housekeeper and doomed to clutter -- in that grand sweep wiping out two and a half years of cleanliness that clearly contradicts my self-deprecation and in fact comprises the majority of my adulthood spent living alone. The past eighteen months have resembled rather how I lived in college during my sister's illness, when various family traumas took up most of my mental and emotional space, leaving no attention to devote to a sparkling dorm room unless I was utterly bored or feeling dutiful toward my poor roommates.

Which only means that I will again be able to live the way I did in the Ivory Tower on Leland Avenue. Pondering how, I watched my pen sprawl across the pages of my little wood-covered diary this morning while I numbered in my head my many happinesses while I lived in that idyllic space and time.

First, I loved the apartment itself. If Romeo had been an apartment, I was Juliet stepping onto its balcony. The moment I walked through those doors for the first time, my pudgy, sweating, creepy potential landlord didn't matter; my exhaustion from viewing terrible apartment after terrible apartment all that day didn't matter; my worries about affording life on my own didn't matter. I felt an unaccustomed peace wash through me, and I felt like I could breathe. The high ceilings, the many long windows, the clean brightness of the light that made the walls glow said, Welcome home.

It brings me to tears even now to remember how much I loved that space, and the bitterness of my leaving it. I was happy there. I fled there for refuge after stressful days. I lounged there all weekend, reveling in the joy that apartment afforded me. Place has always meant a great deal to me, and that place was home. That place was my home. No matter what new enormous monstrosity of furniture I carted in (or wheedled friends' visiting cousins to cart in for me), the apartment accommodated it with gracious ease. The house loved me, and I loved it right back. I adored the little cement porch opening onto the side yard where I could sit in my pajamas without being seen from the street. I loved the half-threatening, half-charming alleyway out back. I loved the neighbors and the old-towney feel of the neighborhood, the dignified historic houses, the warped brick streets. I loved the walk leading down to the sulphur-smelling river, and I loved coming home.

During those years I also had a full roster of social activities. I spent time with the grad students I'd met through MP; MP and I shared whirlwind insane adventures every other day; I made friends at work; I got Simon. I learned to cook, and learned that I was amazing at it. I hosted dinner parties. I befriended the neighbors. I discovered that I was likeable, and that introverted does not mean shy. My intellect received daily stimulation, and my conversation became an art. I treasured my solitude because I didn't have much of it, and emotionally I felt rosy and glowing, perfectly balanced.

I also loved my job. Working with homeless infants and toddlers was draining, and wore me out before a year was out, but I loved working at the Center. I believed in what I did. I was helping others. I was working with like-minded people to make a difference. I was providing a safe space for humanity's most vulnerable, and I loved (most of) those kids. My ideas mattered; I got to put them to use. I met and interacted with frightening people and came to know them as everyday human beings, and more like to myself than I in my former shelteredness would have thought possible. I witnessed the entire spectrum of human capabilities -- the capacity for great things as well as terrible things, which often lived side-by-side in the same person. My work was rewarding, it was interesting, it meant something, it was adventurous.

Even spiritually I was happy enough. I gave up on finding a church, but I read my Bible and prayed and was aware of God intensely most of the time. I had surprising conversations with surprising people that taught me more of the omnipresence of God's love. I burned with purpose. I was ready for anything. Every day unfolded before me with hints of the unexpected, the joyouse eternal, like a slowly opening flower, and it was all mine to discover. I was a pioneer.

I haven't really had those things, and certainly not all at once, since that time. Even back then I knew I wouldn't stay in those circumstances forever; but I could only think of bigger and better things to follow. And for the first time in my life, I was happy in the present, and not merely with dreams of the future. I've struggled to recover that certainty ever since. I moved on to more practical avenues when necessity forced it, but that was the last time I was freely happy in all facets of my life.

Adventure. A space in surroundings I love. Humanitarian work alongside like-minded people to make a palpable difference in others' lives. Companionship and intellectual stimulation and the daily awareness of grace. My own definition of success. Even relative poverty -- money doesn't matter much to me if I have what I need and enough extra for little things I like, if I love what I'm doing. These are the things I want most, the things for which I yearn, the things which I had in shadow form back in 2005. Of course love and good food would be the ideal additions to this, my blueprint of the perfect life, but love will happen in its own time however I feel about it (and however frequently I'm convinced that I will burst into flame if I don't get to this whole marriage bed thing before my ovaries turn into raisins and my boobs start holding neighborly conversations with my navel and my face collapses into spiderlines like a cracked window) and good food I can scare up pretty much anywhere.

With those factors in mind, I have begun for the last month to consider seriously, and with serious prayer, some kind of overseas mission work. Short-term to start with, I think -- a year-long trip. As important as literacy is to me, I'm thinking if I can't find work in the mission field, I can always look for ways to teach. And I'm not thinking city work either; my heart has always lain with the more rural settings of the world. Perhaps I can even find a combination of the two as a missionary teacher somewhere remote. And when I think of the writing that would come out of those kinds of experiences, my skin ripples out in goosebumps.*

There's an overwhelming amount of research to be done, and I have little idea where to start (I'm an ideas person before I'm a details person, but hey, intelligent people adapt, right?). God might shut this idea down before I can bring it to fruition, or it could lose its appeal (which would probably relieve Mom -- though if God calls me to do anything, I know my parents will support it). Or perhaps it will instead be fine-tuned as His will becomes clearer to me, and take me somewhere unexpected where all of those things will be perfectly fulfilled in ways I hadn't imagined. That's usually the case. But regardless, that angle is the one I'll be working in the immediate future. I would never have seen myself saying, "Here I am. Send me!" Not in a million years. I was too afraid, and too attached to the soft and easy life. I'm still scared and fond of comfort, but I'm becoming increasingly convinced that there's more to life than the line of aimless subsistence I've drifted along the past couple of years, and increasingly convinced that it's in sacrificing many of the things I find comfortable that I come closer to discovering life's real meaning, which is far outside myself, or, perhaps more accurately, in the power of God working through the community of people (of which I am a part) drawing near to Christ and laboring in a gritty, front-lines way for a better world.

However that must happen, I want it. I still don't know the particulars, but until I receive a better word, that's the path I'll be preparing to follow, if only for a year. We'll see where God takes it. It seems, as I pray and prepare and give up a lot of my pride and independence and learn a different kind of interdependence than the one I'm used to, that I'm closer to the right direction than I've been in years, and that all of the choices I've made have been leading toward this. I was right not to go to grad school. I was right not to take the fast-track to money-making success. I was right to go when God said, Go. I was right to come back home to get my affairs in order and to meditate on what really matters. I was right to choose the friends I've chosen and to love as I love and have loved. I was right to wait, and now I'm right to prepare. Something is coming, and it's time to get ready. And it will be stunningly, powerfully, humblingly great.

Ack! Now where do I start?


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* Why goosebumps? Why not chickenbumps, or duckbumps, or swanbumps, or pigeonbumps? Doesn't the skin of all plucked birds look the same? Were geese more widely eaten at some point in the history of England than other domestic fowl? Personally, I think "Duckbumps" would have been a better title for R. L. Stine's stupid pseudo-horror series pandering to the young and illiterate. "Goosebumps" is totally wasted on that concept.