Find Your Writers Before They Go

I am neither a Jewish New Yorker, nor an African American poet.  These truths are simple and irrefutable.  Yet through literature all things are possible.  One morning last spring a dear friend and colleague texted me: "Maya Angelou died today."  I realize that I am now of the age when the living writers I love, those whose words have informed and inspired me, are going to be dying.  Someday there will not be a new collection of Billy Collins poems.  My children and I agree that we can't even let ourselves think about the day when the Breaking News will say "J.K. Rowling, beloved author of the internationally popular Harry Potter novels..."  Yeah, I can't go there.

Two of my favorite writers have already died, so they will be the subject of this blog.  The writers we find in life allow us to live as we never have, be people we can never be.  Yet another bullet point in the list of reasons why reading is so important in life.
   

Nora Ephron

I once joked that I wished every movie starred Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan (Smores, Like Gold in My Hand) It isn't because of Meg's girl-next-door smile, or that Tom is the Everyman.  It's the writing.  It's Nora.  I love her quick wit and sassiness. I love the clarity of her voice and the clean, simple style of her prose.  Ephron reveals truth in compact, simple sentences, a skill she honed as a journalist and one we all would do well to imitate.

She once said her mother advised her to see that the tragic stories of one day could be the comic stories of the next.  I have found her mother's wisdom to be true as I attempt to raise five children as a single mother who teaches high school.  The night the ants invaded the bathroom on a Tuesday I found myself on my hands and knees, sobbing about the frustration and injustice of my life.  I did not see the humor in that moment, nor did I want to write.  I just wanted to sleep.  I submit the novel version, however, might read something like this:

The Night of the Ants

They came in through the bathroom window, not nearly as welcome as if they had been a peppy Beatles song.  They came in huge and marching determinedly down the side of the shower, across the floor, around the perimeter, up the door, under the toilet paper, around to the garbage, under the sink, and back again in a seemingly endless circle of life except without the wisecracking meerkat or uplifting pop anthem.  They were carpenter ants.  The terrifying encounter came at 1:45 a.m. when I stumbled into the bathroom and was already busy before I ever opened my eyes.  I felt something tickle my feet. I opened my eyes, blinking furiously in horror to adjust to the light and the parade of smelly black ants everywhere I looked.  There was no shutting the bathroom door and dealing with it later.  It was the only bathroom for six people.  It had to be handled.  I had to handle it.  I dove in--ant spray, Windex, Clorox wipes--whatever I could find to swipe, kill, and destroy.  I worked furiously, with fear and loathing, so that any little person to enter the bathroom that night would not be greeted with the same nightmare vision.  They returned again and again like some kind of Terminator Ant Model #10,000 from far into the future.  Where the hell is John Connor when you really need him?

Nora Ephron comes to mind when I have a moment I think I can't bear.  If nothing else, surviving the moment means I might eventually be able to write something decent about it.  

The plays, screenplays,  and collections of essays she produced are laugh-out-loud-funny, even as they describe the lowest points of her life.  She turned her divorce into the darkly comic, brilliant screenplay Heartburn.  In explaining why she did not divorce sooner, even when she knew the marriage was over, she said she had an inordinate capacity for making lemonade.  This resonates with me as I look back on my own twenty-eight year relationship that died long before the marriage ever took place.  I have made too many pitchers of lemonade in my life.  As I grow old, I hope wisdom and humor will be layered into my pain the way they are in Ephron's work. She is a mentor for aging, not necessarily gracefully, but honestly.

Remember that your writers are those you want to quote.  My Nora Ephron quote saw me through the darkest days of my divorce.  I wish I had read these words at eighteen, but at least I have them now, and so do you, Dear Reader:

             "Above all be the heroine of your life, not the victim." 

Maya Angelou

When I started teaching at Santa Cruz High School in 1996 I was familiar with Maya Angelou's poetry.  I had not read any of her autobiographies.  For the next six years I taught I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings to class after class of sophomores.  The book was core literature for all tenth graders.  It only takes a few sentences of Angelou's story to be transported to rural,  Depression-era Arkansas and transformed by the way Angelou's poetic prose uncurls off the page and attaches itself to your heart.  In her taffeta dress, with high hopes that she will feel like a movie star, her awkward, self-conscious,  younger self flees the church and we feel along with her "the unnecessary insult" not of being poor, black and a girl, but being aware of what that means--"the rust on the razor that threatens the throat."  Angelou was parent-less, poor, and living in an era long removed from my own.  I was a middle class white girl raised in rural California who attended a private Catholic college, but not for the moments her book held me enthralled.  

One gift of reading great literature is that it provides writing models.  A strong writer's voice, so difficult for my students to achieve, is easier to conceptualize when you read the strong voices of great writers.  Angelou doesn't sound like Hemingway doesn't sound like Poe doesn't sound like Dickens doesn't sound like you.  My students and I could look at Angelou's word choice, the order of her sentences, the music of her language and enjoy a master class in writing.  

Finally, as a new teacher Maya Angelou helped me to discuss sexual molestation, life in the segregated south, broken families, the insecurity of coming of age and being a young person who doesn't feel pretty or smart enough.  After tackling those issues through her text, what couldn't I teach?  If reading Angelou's work filled me with joy, teaching her work filled me with confidence.

On the day she died, I hadn't taught Angelou's book for many years.  The first thing I did when I arrived in my classroom that day was to take out my well loved, pencil-marked copy.  I reread passages I had highlighted and discussed with years of students.  I sat at my desk and cried.  I will miss her voice.  I feel so blessed that she will forever be one of my writers.  Perhaps she is one of yours.

Find Your Writers: William Shakespeare

Insults, Sex Ed, and Life Lessons

 I have now entered what may be considered cliche English teacher territory. You  were forced to read Shakespeare in school.  As a grown up, it's okay to return to him.  In fact, at any age Shakespeare's plays and poetry do what all literature should do. They offer us a doorway to ponder essential questions we all ask and attempt to answer.  I do not, nor should you, care so much about metaphor or symbolism.  While those things may be interesting, they aren't what's most exciting about reading.  The silly joy felt at bedtime when your Dad read Green Eggs and Ham. The tummy ache you felt along with the hungry caterpillar as he indulged in junk food that crazy Saturday.  All of that wonder and delight are possible in Shakespeare without analyzing text the way pretentious grad students do.  I know because I was once one of them. Trust high school English teacher me.  Trust love of literature me.  Let the high school angst go.  Read one of his plays voluntarily.  His work is not pretentious or condescending.  Shakespeare is entertainment for the masses.  He is Netflix or your local movie house.  No tuxedo or fruity British accent required.  Make yourself some popcorn, and don your favorite sweatpants.  You will not regret it.

He has witty retorts for your enemies, the sting of which they will immediately comprehend:"Thou art like a toad; ugly and venomous." (As You Like It). You might enjoy those that can remain cryptic to a contemporary reader but be no less satisfying for you:  “You rampallian! You fustilarian!” (Henry IV, Part II). Try it yourself.  Click on the link below and use an insult generator.  Go ahead.  Someone's post on Facebook probably deserves a good zinger.  Shout them at your neighbor's barking dog!

Insults by Shakespeare

Of course, Shakespeare is not all lighthearted ribbing.  He deals with death, too, as our high school reading taught us.  Hamlet grieves the loss of the father he loved so dearly and lost so suddenly.  Devastated by his mother's "o'erhasty marriage," he suspects (correctly) that his uncle Claudius really is a "dammned villain."  When his mother reminds him that all living things die, and asks Hamlet why it seems so particular with him, he tells he tells her:

Seems, madam? nay, it is, I know not "seems."

'Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,

Nor customary suits of solemn black,

Nor windy suspiration of forc'd breath,

No, nor the fruitful river in the eye,

Nor the dejected havior of the visage,

Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief,

That can denote me truly. These indeed seem,

For they are actions that a man might play;

But I have that within which passes show,

These but the trappings and the suits of woe. 

Hamlet, 1.2

All outward ways to show grief are so eclipsed by his actual suffering that he can't express it.  He mourns the loss of his father. He watches his mother move on so quickly that his grief is intensified by loneliness, and the throne that should by all rights be his, is now occupied by a man who labels Hamlet's grief "womanish."  These things are unbearable to Hamlet.

I recalled this speech from Hamlet on the day I buried my grandmother.  I knew that day would come, and at age ninety-two she fended off the inevitable for longer than most.  As my cousins and I stood at the lectern in a small Catholic church where I had attended so many masses as a child, each of our voices broke. Words failed us.

The responsorial psalm was "The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want." I believe my grandmother to be in Paradise with no wants.  However, like Hamlet, I was not. I still inhabited this "sterile promontory". Shepherd or not, I did want.  I wanted my grandmother back.  Why would we even be gathered together without her there?  She was the matriarch.  Who would make Easter bread for us?  Who would talk with me in the early morning hours while the valley fog hung heavy around the farmhouse that she and my grandfather built?  My grandmother walked me down the aisle at my wedding, and now I had to accompany her coffin to a quiet, small, terrifyingly final place in the ground and leave her there.

Yet somehow the loneliness and finality of that moment was helped by having read so many accounts in fiction of characters who had losses akin to my own.  I am not alone in any desperate state.  Shakespeare has written my pain already.  After all, by Act V even Hamlet becomes all Zen about things.  He acknowledges to his best friend that he is about to walk into a death trap (literally).  He may die at the hands of Laertes and evil Uncle/Father Claudius.  He may not.  However he concludes:  "The readiness is all" (Hamlet, 5.2).  And for any other trial in life on a lesser scale than death, Benedick's words always seem to enter my mind:  "For man is a giddy thing...and this is my conclusion" (Much Ado About Nothing, 5.4).  

Then there is the love.  Naive, easily deceived lovers (Claudio and Hero).  Witty, snarky lovers (Benedick and Beatrice).  Jealous love (Othello).  Strong, devoted wives (Portia).  Weak-willed hot messes (Gertrude).  In high school the perennial Shakespearean love story is that of Juliet and her Romeo.  It is not a love we would want for our sons and daughters.  It is tragic.  It is, as Juliet herself worries, "too rash, too unadvised," but it is the literary love all high school students encounter just as they enter the dating years.

Don't get me started on how unattractive Romeo is, as boyfriend material, ladies, at least in the first Act of the play.  Your true love should not be the Emo boy who sleeps all day, mopes all night, and allows his undying love for you to be extinguished the moment he sees the jewel in an Ethiop's ear that is Juliet.  He needs an anti-depressant.  He's probably cutting himself.  He is certainly annoying his friends and worrying his parents.

Someone should really write the story of Rosaline.  She is my hero.  Proud, strong and chaste, she rejects Romeo because she sees how weak he is.  She tells Romeo she plans to live chaste, but I think it may be that she knows, no matter how many gentle or passionate protestations he gives to the contrary, there is something wishy washy in Romeo's love.  Living chaste is just code for she's not that into you, young Montague.  While all of Verona mourns the dead lovers, somewhere in that ancient Italian city, Rosaline is raising a glass of red to her own impeccable instincts.  Perhaps she and Paris can marry.  It's probably the perfect match.  Neither of them seems like the type to take poison or stab themselves without thinking it through.  It is possible, Dear Reader, that parenthood has unfairly altered my reading of this play.

So why is there a Romeo and Juliet initiation into high school literature?  Poetry is one answer.  Light and dark imagery, bird imagery, references to the stars, the sun, the moon--it's all there.  I defy you to read the balcony scene and not be moved at some point.  It's the breathless, adoring way we all want to love and be loved.  The tragedy can come later; carpe diem, young lovers.

The play also allows students to identify with young people who are often powerless to follow their hearts in a world that rejects the idea of them as a couple.  Juliet's relationship with her father goes from his strangely modern claim to Paris early on that he believes Juliet should not yet marry and that she deserves to have a say in her choice of husband to a threat to leave her dying in the streets without food, home, or inheritance if she does not marry Paris.  Romeo and Juliet have even the stars conspiring to keep them apart.  Romeo must deal with his bros teasing him about being in love.  Juiet's Nurse helps the lovers, but when Juliet must face her father's ultimatim, she quickly advises Juliet just to marry Paris and forget she has another husband on earth.

The world is unjust.  Their parents don't understand them. It's us against the world, so no wonder their love is attractive to teens.  Juliet's come night speech --filled with downright sexy, beckoning verse, yearning for her lover, for the cloak of darkness, for striking out against the oppressive forces that hinder young people--is racy rebellious.

"Hood my unmanned blood bating in my cheeks./Come, night; come, Romeo, come"  Romeo and Juliet 3.2

I wonder if the school boards across America would like to take some credit for giving ninth graders everywhere such lyrical reasons to rebel, not to mention the passionate, planned sex.  After all Romeo makes arrangements for a wedding night ladder.  He thought of everything.  It's not like they are planning to paint Capulet's orchard walls, people!

While we're on the subject, do those same school boards know that teaching Romeo and Juliet involves the following topics and many more like them?  Every. Year.

1. Rude hand gestures around the world
2. Thrusting women against a wall and cutting off their maidenheads
3. Women growing bigger by men (pregnancy)
4. Breastfeeding
5. Wedding night sex


Mercutio says these lines in the play: "...the very pin of his heart cleft with the blind boy's butt shaft"(2.4) and "...the bawdy hand of the dial is now on the prick of noon" (2.4)

It does not matter what these lines actually meant to an Elizabethan audience.  To fourteen year olds in 2014 America, they read only as dirty jokes. No matter how quickly I explain something as a reference to Cupid's arrow; their minds have gone some other where.  Mercutio also makes fun of the older, overweight Nurse in the streets of Verona to the raucous approval of the other teen boys with him.  Nice.  We shall read that during fifth period and then head off to that anti-bullying assembly.

All English teachers appreciate irony.  Every year as I teach this play to the impressionable youth of America whose parents fret over curfews and Facebook posts, who put parental controls on the television and forbid their children to attend R rated movies, I appreciate irony.  This is why I love the works of William Shakespeare.  They speak to the human condition in all its messy, uncomfortable, often hilarious and awkward complexity.  Love and sex go together.  Young men enjoy a dirty joke.  Young women fantasize about being intimate with their boyfriends.  Not much has changed because what makes us human beings does not change.

In a list of my favorite writers, Shakespeare will always be there, not because I am a pretentious academic who wants to impress you but because I am a human being.  Notice I haven't addressed the difficulty of the language because it's really not that difficult and because you don't need to understand every word in every play or sonnet to feel Shakespeare speaks to you.  My ninth graders tackle it with great success every year.

Shakespeare isn't for tea and crumpets while wearing high heels and shiny nail polish.  He is for breathing in mountain air, stomping around in muddy spring puddles, and sweating it out on a satisfying hike.  Reading can be, should be, a journey that leads us to a better understanding of ourselves and the other selves around us.  While hiking through the human condition, Shakespeare is a wonderful trail guide.

You might think of Shakespeare's writing as the rich, dark chocolate you indulge in when no one is looking.  He is the thirty year old glass of Scotch you drink at your grandfather's birthday.  Shakespeare is all the delightful, precious, and fine possibilities in our language.  Do not deny yourself that pleasure, Dear Reader.  You deserve the best.

Find Your Writers: John Green

“Green writes books for young adults, but his voice is so compulsively readable that it defies categorization. The Fault in Our Stars proves that the hype surrounding Green is not overblown.” -NPR 

The rapidity of his speech.  His unabashed passion for...well, everything.  The clear-sighted way he sees teenagers, and the empathy and love with which he writes about them is unparalleled.  Now, you might think a high school teacher is bitter about teens and cynical about those years.  Quite the contrary.  I love young people.  I love their black and white way of seeing the world, their questions, their daily attempts to find their own path and voice, their enthusiasm, and their idealism.  John Green knows all of this, and just like Hazel Grace says about Peter Van Houten, I would read his shopping lists.  Hemingway once advised:  "Write the truest sentence you know."  So many sentences from his novels will resonate with you long after you finish reading.  Like Hemingway, his style is spare, clean, and honest.  He does not insult his audience by talking down to them.  His depiction of adolescence is truthful and joyful without being sentimental.  There are varying degrees of Holden Caufield in every teenager, and John Green may be one of the few people Holden would not accuse of being a phony.  I adore his novels enough to read them more than once, which is a rarer thing than you might imagine.  

 Moreover, my daughters do as well.  At a time in their lives when they are pulling away from me, I delight in the things we still share.  Cherished are the T.V. shows or movies equally loved by my pre-teen daughters and me.  Even more cherished are the books.  Their obsessive love of reading is something to feed and fuel.  I may feel guilty when I buy them donuts on a Saturday morning, or spend too much money at Forever 21, but I never feel any guilt about spending fifty dollars on John Green books for them.  They are like a literary Flinstones vitamin for me, and a midnight ice cream sundae for them.  Delicious, emotionally satisfying, and good for them.  For all of us.  

You should start with The Fault in Our Stars for many reasons.  It's his best novel.  You will begin and then not be able to stop reading until the last page.  You will then want to start over again because the characters are just that memorable, the ideas just that thought-provoking.  If you are a teenager, you will start looking for your own Augustus Waters or Hazel Grace Lancaster.  Will the novel break your heart and leave you cursing the writer who has left you in pieces on the floor with just his words?  Yes.  Yes, it will, which is why you must read it.  Furthermore, the movie comes out in less than a month.  Do not insult such a life-changing novel by seeing the movie first. It's shameful.

Green's novels do not need to be read in any particular order, so after TFIOS read anything this man has written.  He does not disappoint. 

Find Your Writers

Dear High School Student,

I could write an open letter about sexually transmitted diseases.  Perhaps I could wax didactic about pot smoking.  After all if you don't take Nancy Reagan's insipid advice and say "no," you could watch yourself, from outside your body, allowing the enticing and rewarding to just float away into oblivion while you rationalize your isolated and increasingly sedentary existence.  That high deceived you.  You did not prove string theory or find Amelia Earhart last night.  It was just a video game and some Mountain Dew, and this morning your life has yet again not progressed.

I could do that, but I won't because I'm writing to you, Dear Student, about reading. What else?  Contrary to my current job description, I am, and will forever be, a teacher of literature.  Today I want to talk to you about how noble, and essential reading is.  Before you crumple up this letter, metaphorically speaking, hear me out.  Well, the hearing should be literal, the crumpling metaphorical.  Come to think of it, you are not literally able to hear me, so that is also metaphorical.  Most things are.  But I digress.  I do not mean the skill of reading.  Today I do not care about guessing meaning from context or decoding words by their Greek and Roman roots.  Let's be honest, even on my best day I don't care much about those things.  What I care about is you, Dear Reader.  I care about you, and because I do I have one request:

Find Your Writers.

You have already found your favorite movies, bands, snack foods, and youtube channels.  Your generation is adept at generating playlists and Instagram likes.  You know the exact filter you want to use on that picture of your Burrito Supreme so it looks kind of hipster, despite its corporate tool origins. I know you have opinions about all manner of things and a keen understanding of what you like and don't like.  So, find the perfect filter, post it to your Snapchat story or your Tumblr and come with me to that last frontier for some of you--the bookshelf.  

You must find your writers.  The ones who speak to you.  The ones you return to again and again.  You will share her poems with your friends when they go through a bad break up.  You will post colorful memes from a favorite chapter, and you will dream that someday you'll meet someone just like....  

Some of you have already found your writers, so you have an image right now in your mind.  Is it Augustus?  Four? Katniss? Holden? Hermione? Romeo? It should NOT be Romeo, but more on that later. Many of you have not found your writers though, and it is to you I write.  If you read enough, you will fall into the worlds created in fiction.  You will begin to see more clearly the Victorian sitting room as it is described.  You will taste the acrid smoke of the artillery fire, and when she brushes up against the sleeve of his wool coat as they share a cab, you will feel their chills.  Literature transports us, and since unfortunately the Doctor may not be coming in his TARDIS to whisk you away through all of time and space, you should start seeking your own adventures.

While the feeling of being lifted from your world into other realms is wonderful, do not read only for sensory pleasure and escape.  Reading can be a way to work through your fears, doubts, and insecurities.  A fictionalized, yet nonetheless realistic other self can be your therapist.  You cannot change your alcoholic father.  Swallowing anger and sadness poisons only your own blood.  However, find a novel that speaks in a voice like your own. If it is well-written, and so many of them are, it will help you.  You will say, "Yeah, dammit, that's how I feel!" A cynical person may tell you this is not real solace because it's just a book; it isn't real.  I submit to you that our understanding of what is real is decidedly and unimaginably limited.  When Harry realizes that the Kings Cross station encounter is happening in his head, he worries it is somehow not real.  Dumbledore reassures him: 

“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”  

 Think about how much of your life every day is spent inside your head.  While sitting in class, while watching that cute girl laugh with her friends, while listening to your mom lecture you about your grades--there is a running monologue in your head.  Those thoughts aren't physically happening for all the world to see, but it doesn't make them less real to you.  They are yours, intimately yours.  Books can help you live the interior monologue of others, just as intimately as the voice in your own head because your reading voice is also in your own head.  Unless you read everything out loud, which is just odd.  You should probably see someone about that.  Instead of therapy, or writing more bad confessional poetry in your diary, try a book.  You will be pleasantly rewarded.  Find a writer whose voice you like, a writer who shares your most intimate concerns.  Then join that writer in a meditative conversation.  

Over the next few blogs I will submit to you some of my writers.  I do so in order to show you how and why writers come to be important to us.  Sometimes it is just the way their words roll around deliciously in our heads as we read.  At other times a book is yours because it came to you at a moment in your life when you needed it, and now it has become part of your heart and memory in a way that you are not willing to dismiss.  These writers are not mine because they are great necessarily, although I will fight anyone who says otherwise.  They are mine the way a particular stuffed animal was mine in my toddler bed.  They are mine the way I like my coffee with sugar and cream so it looks like a paper bag and tastes like an autumn morning.  They are mine the way my favorite jeans are mine.  The works of my writers fit. They make me happy.  I like holding them, drinking them in, and being inside them.  

I have many practical things to teach you, Dear Student, but when you love someone you tell them the truth.  The truth is I do not care if you remember the ending to Guy de Maupassant's "The Necklace".  Nor do I care if years from now you remember the number of lines in a sonnet or how many metric feet are in a line of iambic pentameter.  I don't even care if you truly understand what the green light at the end of the dock represents.  Okay, perhaps I care a little about that one, but I'm willing to let it go in favor of a larger, more essential truth.  Reading enriches your life in ways incalculable, strange, and lasting.  This does not happen magically, nor does it happen with every book.  You must do the work.  You must find your writers.

My first writer for next time will be John Green.  If you have not already found him, I submit he could easily be one of your writers, too.  Unlike so many grouchy grown-ups, Green loves the place in your life where you find yourself right now--adolescence.  Until we meet again, I will sign off with a link to his Crash Course videos on The Great Gatsby because although I said I would let that green light go, I can't do it any more than Gatsby can.  Perhaps F. Scott Fitzgerald is one of your as-yet-undiscovered-writers.  Besides, if you watch the videos now, you might begin to understand why John Green is one of my writers.  More on Mr. Green later.

For now, Dear Student, farewell.

“I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.” 

--Karen Blixen, Out of Africa

So begins the film Out of Africa.  Meryl Streep portrays Isak Dinesen in her transformative journey from Europe to Africa and back again. In the film, Karen Blixen creates a new life for herself, a life she may not have thought possible. She defies expectation--a woman managing her own farm without a husband to help her. Technically she has a husband, but his interests lie more in womanizing and hunting than in farming. By the end of her journey the men in the local club who had at first shunned her, now toast her accomplishments. Their toast recognizes that the limits they had assumed bordered a woman's life were artificial. They toast her courage, to face and overcome hardships, and emerge on the other side.

That phrase--"I had a farm in Africa"--has been rattling around in my mind for the past twelve months ever since I entered a painful, terrifying period which started with the unknown and ended with my life transformed. I walked out of my old life, and holding tightly to my five children, entered a new one. While the geography of my transition was not sufficiently grand to warrant a John Williams score, the shift was no less dramatic. I thought I had entered into an abyss, the heart of a darkness I neither understood nor knew how to navigate without possibly losing my mind.  

Much to my relief, spasms and waves of relief over a long period of time, I did not slip into madness or embrace a Kurtz-like oblivion. Instead I discovered steps along a path already created for me that led to a sanctuary in the woods, a tiny cottage in the mountains.  Our time there, in that tiny house, may have seemed like hardship but it was actually Providence, complete with all of the old-fashioned grandeur of that word. On our journey, we were accompanied by angels, miracles, and the patient, loving hand of God.

Within twenty-four hours after I left my home, friends fiercely and generously surrounded me, and we were given a new place to live. While I want to publish the names of the two generous people who handed me keys and told me not to worry about rent for "as long as you need," I will allow them anonymity here. 


The seven hundred square foot cottage may seem inadequate in the abstract. Frankly, it was probably practically inadequate, too. One bathroom for six people. A potty-training boy and five females. Is that even possible? From the moment we arrived, we knew our time there was temporary. I lay awake in the small hours of the morning and stared around that tiny space while the sleeping inhalation and exhalation of five children hummed around me. Two on the futon on the floor with me. One more on the Murphy bed behind the couch.  Two more in the bedroom steps away.

I love my children, but I did not want them drooling on my pillow and kicking me in the kidneys permanently. When Karen arrived in Africa, she did not anticipate a return to Europe, but I knew the six of us could not stay here long, both because we did not want to try our friends' generosity and we needed more square footage.  

In the film Denis leaves Karen in solitude for long periods of time. She resents this...as much as any woman can resent Robert Redford dressed like this:

In our house there was no solitude. Quiet stretches to contemplate and shape a story for our future did not exist. Each of us slept with at least one other person within arm's reach. My youngest ate his meals on the floor, using his Lego board as a table. School mornings were a jumble of arms, toothbrushes and curling irons in the bathroom followed by a frantic flurry to find shoes and backpacks piled up around the base of the wood stove.  Imagine how many pairs of shoes you own. Now multiply by six. Add in the organizational skills you had when you were 13, 11, 10, 5, and 3. The answer to this math problem is that you can't find your shoes.  

We didn't have an oven, so the previously frequent morning muffins and bread puddings disappeared. Affectionately dubbed "guilt muffins" by me, baked goods were a before-school gesture that helped me stave off the feelings of inadequacy faced by so many working mothers.

Instead, cold cereal or toast were the only possible options, and the eleven year old's penchant for smoothies, while a welcome change, also meant an alarm clock of grinding blender gears all too early in the morning. Why is the smoothie loving child also the one who rises first each day?  

Human beings can make anything work with the right attitude. There are always others who have it worse than me, a mantra that has fueled my perseverance through many a dark hour. I have found anything is possible, and not just survivable, but joyful.  

Just look at it--small, but inviting and warm--a sacred refuge. Please, Dear Reader, do not misunderstand me. Space was a problem, but the place, people, and landscape were only blessings.

Did you know Santa summers in the Sierra Nevada mountains? He fixes toilets and hauls garbage cans. He has his own wolf pack since it's too far south for his reindeer. Snow white beard and generous heart, the twinkle in the eye...all are still there, just put to use in other ways. My children have gone on adventurous treks with him up hills and into rivers.  Ask them; they will tell you.

My journey was not marked by a tense standoff with a lion or an airplane flight surveying the changing landscape of the African plain. However, the majesty of Africa's animals have nothing on the enormous grey lion, who perched on our bed and lounged in our front yard. He allowed my children to pet his mighty mane while he rolled on the gravel drive.  He walked out into the night and did not return, but we shall not forget his visits and hospitality, allowing us to share his home.

There were herds of deer who ambled through the yard and up the hill behind our bedroom windows. They paused curiously, wondering what we were doing there, and then moved on.

And there were two angels.  Did you know angels sometimes reside in ordinary homes? They maintain regular jobs and the mundane details of their own lives, while simultaneously generating magic and grace, beauty and joy, in the lives of others. They alighted in my front yard and whisked my children away for ice cream one warm summer evening. They picked up my children on a roaring metal steed and rambled around the mountains, even into the river to squeals of delight. They delivered lemon cake and stopped by just to make sure we were okay. They listened to me while I rambled and unpacked the fear and frustration, questions and worries of my heart. Angels come in human form, of this I am certain.

Sometimes the Lord pushes us away from all comforts, and allows us to journey into the terrifying unknown. Far from frightening, what I found was a way already prepared. The road rose to meet us, bringing necessities and graces alike. There was little physical space but unlimited emotional space, psychological space, in which I could remake my life, reimagine the possibilities of happiness for my children, and heal from years of lonely struggle. 

"Perhaps he knew, as I did not, that the Earth was made round so that we would not see too far down the road.”― Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa

If I had continued to wait, not changing my life until it was convenient, affordable, and safe, I would not have changed anything. Instead, walking into the darkness led me to see that I need never fear. Ironically my favorite passage in Scripture is the verse "Be still and know that I am God." My experiences in 2013 illuminated what that verse has always meant, but I had not seen clearly. Our comfort in this life comes from God, yes, but He does not work alone. I did not need a mystical experience or radical conversion. I was shown that all around us, everyday, people do God's work in our lives. Friends. Colleagues. People from my church and community. Family far away. Sudden strangers. All conspired to guide, teach, and love me through it, and they did the same for each of my five children. Thank you. You know who you are. You have been prayed for by six grateful hearts, and you will remain treasures to us as we continue along paths known and unknown.  

“When in the end, the day came on which I was going away, I learned the strange learning that things can happen which we ourselves cannot possibly imagine, either beforehand, or at the time when they are taking place, or afterwards when we look back on them.”    
― Karen Blixen, Out of Africa