A Rebuke, But a Comfort

Feelings of unrest and homesickness or loneliness may be for your good. Your heavenly Father means to teach you to find in Him the friendship and love and consolation that will satisfy your most earnest hopes and desires. . . . Your only safety and happiness are in making Christ your constant counselor. You can be happy in Him if you had not another friend in the wide world.

-Ellen White, Our High Calling

Exquisitely Guided

But why must the right decision cut so very deep,
And why must my heart sing its praise through tears?

Reporting a Turn- January 18, 2008

Perhaps I am not your typical snowboarder, not being either a flying board-grabber, a spinning speeder, or a baggy-clothed bum, but when a cheap ticket comes along I will always be one of the first to turn on it. Somehow even air filled with driving snow flurries is not a deterent, nor the low socked-in clouds and wind that pierce through my clothing and make me shiver inside my thick Vermont skin- I'll do my best to carve the fresh powder into curving paths and plow my share of the snow down the mountain with my inexpert back edge.

That is how I ended up spiraling down the surface of of Burke Mountain last Friday, reporting, as is usual for Northern Vermont, a gray sky and a certain amount of cold precipitation. Imagine my surprise as a swifter wind arrived and puffed away the icy shrouds, giving me a glimpse of a wild and brilliant sky-- turning a delicious day into a scrumptious one, especially since it concerned a pair of thick boots and a fat board, and a couple of snaking trenches through the snow.

Contentment

Last night, after stumbling over a disarray of clothing and books, I located my lamp and turned it on to find this little cat cuddled up in sheer delight in my chair.

Nutmeg's world is one of chaos. She is the undercat of our household, the hated child of her mother, the tortured plaything for our youngest imp; a little peace-lover who is very often denied the quiet she craves. And yet look at her, listen to her, safe in my room, in a pile of messy blanket and rumpled quilt, cozy, drowsy, content.

So often I find myself complaining about my life. So many times I have heard myself saying that I hate officework, or that the roads are too icy to ride on, or that there are too many huge decisions to make, or that I am scared for the future. But look at this little sleeper again. I have so much to be thankful for, a family who loves me, the opportunity for a college education, a beautiful place to live in, a few close friends, a God who loves me.

Tonight if you come and visit, make your way up the stairs to my bedroom. There will likely still be a few clothes scattered across the floor, the bed might be unmade, but there will be candles lit, and a cheery little lamp shining, and some Fernando Ortega softly playing. You will find me in my chair on the rumpled quilt and wrapped up in the disheveled blanket, reading and thinking, and being thankful. I am taking a moment to be content and only peace is welcome here, well, that and friendship, and fond regard, and the little tortiseshell cat whose purr is vibrating my toes.

Blister

1. An orb of warm fluid contained in a delicate, transparent pearl of skin, or

2. A simple word but with such connotations as which might make the two syllables themselves shiver were they to hear them, or

3. Bliss, trying to keep up with the snowshoes of her sister.

Dad's Turn

He was the first owl I ever heard hoot, cupping his hands around his mouth and giving his eerie call out into the dark woods around us, letting it echo up and around in the moonlight, floating back down to us a memory,
And a familiar sound,
And a symbol of the places he has always loved and that we now love with him...

Happy Birthday, Dad

See You in May?

I have a note from you in my fifth grade yearbook
that begins "I'm glad you're my sister" and ends
with the not so complementary "You're
pretty annoying sometimes"... I guess I was, and
perhaps you were not so angelic a big brother
yourself at that point...


But a nine-year-old note only holds giggle value

Happy Birthday to RMK

We used to call her Rachel Marie Otter,
A lover of lakes
And ponds and streams and snow and ice,
Sliding, swimming, skating
Lithe with enthusiasm.
And now it is rock,
Ice, snow, mountains, goats
Ropes, packs, m&ms and cashews,
Energy and muscled legs and Jersey Cows
An otter still,
Having scaled the very stream banks
Where thought impossible.

Incident Report

A girl left her home this morning in a little 97 Geo Metro coup, starting out late to work as usual. You probably do not care to hear this morning's reasons for such tardiness, but she would tell you-- it was her horse, and the snow, and the extra ice on the windshield, and the town trucks who had left a berm in front of her car, Dinah.

She knew she was going too fast. She had just taken water up to her horse's pasture a half mile up the winding dirt road, had driven down way too briskly for a snow-covered surface, and had decided that she needed to slow down as she headed down the steepest part of the hill. She was thinking especially of the very narrow and sharp corner at the bottom, an old railroad trestle. She had only ever met people in the railroad trestle about three times in her life, but of course there was someone passing through at the same moment this morning, when her car was not responding to any of her instructions whatsoever and when the nagging "late" word had settled down into her right foot. She found herself headed straight for the driver's door of a big GMC Dinah-eating truck, a certain crunch inevitable...

It was as if Someone had turned her at the last possible second--Dinah's wheels found sudden traction and speeded up the snowbank on the right side of the road, imbedding her firmly in a snowbank recording over two feet worth of accumulated snow after only grazing the side of the truck. And then there was a man, whom the girl had never met before, coming through the trestle, to stop and pull her out, to chuckle at her bumper sticker, and to give her a friendly wave as she headed off-- no ambulance, no policeman, only some copied insurance information. And if you had looked close, you might have seen two grateful sparkles that clung to the girl's lashes but never quite marked a path down her face. Later this afternoon if you had been watching you might once again have seen her blue eyes fill with wonder as she discovered that her driver's side mirror was completely gone--maybe that is where He put His hand.