Winter Weather and Sunday Drives

The wind howls outside, and it is forecast to keep howling.  I've been awake for hours, working on my sermon and looking at maps and radar and weather forecasts, trying to figure out if it's safe to make our way across the mountain.  It's been snowing in Bristol, where we're headed, but the forecast calls for no accumulation.  We will make the attempt to get to Faith Lutheran in Bristol, where I preach and preside every Sunday. 

As always, I send the sermon manuscript ahead of us--that way, if something happens, much of worship can still continue.

There are drawbacks and limitations to this Synod Appointed Minister position--for both me and for the congregation.  I can't do much quality pastoral care from a distance.  The weather can make it impossible for me to do the main work, the preaching and presiding (and leading Confirmation class) on Sunday mornings--and wintry weather is the culprit, not summer weather.

I know that people who live much further north, say in Minneapolis, would laugh at my weather concerns.  A bit of wind, a bit of snow--what is the big deal?  But we are still essentially in the U.S. South, where we don't get much wintry weather.

Let me bring this brief blog post to a close and start strategizing a warm outfit for the drive.

The Feast Day of Santa Lucia

Today is the feast day of Santa Lucia, a woman in 4th century Rome during a time of horrible persecution of Christians and much of the rest of the population, and she was martyred.  The reasons for her martyrdom vary:   Did she really gouge out her eyes because a suitor commented on their beauty? Did she die because she had promised her virginity to Christ? Was she killed because the evil emperor had ordered her to be taken to a brothel because she was giving away the family wealth? Was she killed because a rejected suitor outed her for being a Christian?  We don’t really know.  

She is most often pictured with a crown of candles on her head, and tradition says that she wore a candle crown into the catacombs when she took provisions to the Christians hiding there.  With a candle crown, she freed up a hand to carry more supplies.  I love this idea, but it wouldn't surprise me to find out that it isn't true.

Truth often doesn't matter with these popular saints like Lucia, Nicholas, and Valentine.  We love the traditions, and that means we often know more about the traditions than we do about the saints behind them, if we know anything at all about the saints behind these popular days.

This feast day still seems relevant for two reasons.  First, Lucia shows us the struggle that women face in daily existence in a patriarchal culture, the culture that most of us still must endure.  It’s worth remembering that many women in many countries today don’t have any more control over their bodies or their destinies than these long-ago virgin saints did. In this time of Advent waiting, we can remember that God chose to come to a virgin mother who lived in a culture that wasn’t much different than Santa Lucia’s culture: highly stratified, with power concentrated at the top, power in the hands of white men, which made life exceeding different for everyone who wasn't a powerful, wealthy, white man. It's a society that sounds familiar, doesn't it?

On this feast day of Santa Lucia, we can spend some time thinking about women, about repression, about what it means to control our destiny.  We can think about how to spread freedom.

It's also an important feast day because of the time of year when we celebrate.  Even though we're still in the season of late autumn, in terms of how much sunlight we get, those of us in the northern hemisphere are in the darkest time of the year.  It's great to have a festival that celebrates the comforts of this time of year:  candles and baked goods and hot beverages.

I love our various festivals to get us through the dark of winter. In these colder, darker days, I wish that the early church fathers had put Christmas further into winter, so that we can have more weeks of twinkly lights and candles to enjoy. Christmas in February makes more sense to me, even though I understand how Christmas ended up near the Winter Solstice.

I made my traditional Santa Lucia bread last week, for a gathering where I wanted one slightly healthier treat to be available.  Today, I'm baking a different bread, but you could make a more traditional offering.  If you’d like to try, this blog post will guide you through it.  You could end with bread braids cooling on racks in just a few hours:

If you’re the type who needs pictures, it’s got a link to a blog post with pictures.  Enjoy.

Happy Santa Lucia day! Have some special bread, drink a bracing hot beverage, and light the candles against the darkness.

Teaching Insights from a Great Semester

Before I get too far away from Fall semester, I want to record some teaching insights that I want to remember.  I've just gotten teaching evaluations and I spent last week reading final exams, which have students reflect on the semester, so I want to be sure to remember some of those insights, along with my own.

--I've been intrigued by how many students enjoyed peer editing.  If I was a student, peer editing would be one of my least favorite things because I hate group work, and I wouldn't be getting much feedback that was useful.  But students who did comment on peer editing talked about how much they enjoyed seeing what other students were writing about, and some of them talked about how peer editing helped them get to know their fellow students.  Duly noted--I'll continue peer editing and experiment with peer editing in my 102 classes.

--I had far fewer students complain about my no cell phones policy.  A few said they appreciated having a time when they were less plugged in.  I am much more committed to my no cell phones policy than I was 2 years ago.  I've gone even further in that I rarely allow students to use laptops or tablets.  Students have plenty of time to use their devices.  In my classes, I want them to use their brains and their hands to record notes.

--Many students liked my adopt-a-tree assignment, which I used in both English 100 and 101 classes.  They may have been telling me what they thought I wanted to hear, but their assessments seemed genuine.  They talked about being mystified at first, or even angry about how the tree assignments have nothing to do with college--but then they talked about the skills that they honed (description, writing directions, deep observation), and a few talked about how those skills were useful beyond the assignment.

--I put creative writing assignments in every class, regardless of whether or not it's a creative writing class.  The students who commented on these assignments talked about how much they liked them both for the sake of creativity and for doing something different and for inspiring them to think about writing differently.  Again, they may have been telling me what they thought I wanted to hear, but for the most part, I don't think so.

--I am surprised by how many students I have had this term who want to be writers--not content creators, not influencers, not TikTok stars, but writers like the ones we've studied.  You might say, "Sure, of course, you teach creative writing."  But the creative writing students were just a small number of the total students who talked about wanting to be stronger writers, not just to be better writers so that they could get better grades.  Many of them wanted to continue their creative writing.

--One of my creative writing students wrote about how I had reignited her interest in being an English teacher.  She wrote passionately about her desire to teach in middle school or high school.  I felt happy about that, about being an inspiration as a teacher, not just as a writer.

--I want to remember that I occasionally would leave a class thinking that it had been a failure (especially with peer editing, which never goes as smoothly as I'd like) only to find out that students had a very different experience.

--I have become even more committed to having a daily writing grade, most of it done by hand.  It's a practical way to end the class, and it lets me know what students are learning.  I've created larger projects that have them revise the daily writings.  It helps us talk about AI, about how it might be useful and how it's not.  It ensures that students are doing at least some writing on their own.

I feel very lucky to have had such a great semester with so many students who seemed so open minded and happy to be in class together.  I feel fortunate beyond words to be at a small, liberal arts college with increasing enrollment.  May this good fortune continue!

Returning to Bethlehem Again

I spent much of yesterday doing volunteer work, but not the traditional kind.  I haven't been stocking the food pantry or knitting scarves.  Yesterday I went over to a local Methodist church that allows its gym to be transformed into ancient Bethlehem for a walk-through, immersive experience, Return to Bethlehem.  All proceeds go to Asheville Buncombe Community Christian Ministry (ABCCM), an interfaith group which works on hunger and homelessness issues in Buncombe county, the county which contains Asheville.

I first started doing this volunteer work in December of 2023, and I wrote a blog post about it, which I'll quote here:   "I thought it might be something like a living Nativity scene, maybe with a few extra scenes. I was wrong. It's a whole living Nativity village. One of the supervisors walked me through the space, telling me about how the visitors would stop at each station to hear actors tell about the space. For example, there's a weaver's house, and the Temple, and a place where a person dyes cloth. Eventually the tour ends up at the inn and the stable outside of the inn."

It takes a lot of work to make this transformation:  lots of hanging and draping of fabric, LOTS of industrial stapling, lots of arranging of baskets and chairs and potted plants and such.  I love doing it, and I'm happy to help.  It hits a weird combination of my interests:  the illusions of stagecraft, theatre, fabric, color and texture--creating illusions and believability.

Here's a 2023 picture, when the theatre flats were first being assembled.

Eventually each station gets its own furniture and tubs of supplies.  We have other tubs of fabric we can use, all sorts of fabrics.

And then, finally, a finished product, in this case, the Temple (this is a 2023 picture--I forgot to take pictures of  yesterday's creation, where I used more blue fabrics and velvets).

It's more standing on a ladder than I'd like, but I'm happy I can still do it.  I expected to be much more sore this morning than I am.

After a morning working on the Return to Bethlehem sets, I went over to the local Lutheran church to work on Lutheran World Relief quilts.  We assembled 4 quilts to get them ready for knotting.  I prefer to assemble quilt tops out of all the fabric we have, but by assembling those quilts, one of our members could take them home to get the knotting done.  I did bring some fabric home in the hopes that I/we can assemble a quilt top or two in the next week.  And then I made some repairs to a quilt top that my spouse had been assembling before he got frustrated and made ill-advised cuts.

Today I'll go back to the Methodist church--we're racing against the clock, since Return to Bethlehem opens at 6 tonight.  When I left yesterday at 1, we had made good progress, and more volunteers were expected.  Many of us have some experience now, which makes it easier to get things done.  And we seem to have enough ladders and enough staplers, lacks which have slowed us down in the past.

And now it is time to shift my morning into a different gear, to get ready for another day of volunteering in this way.

Publication Ponderings in Mid-December

I woke up this morning thinking about publication opportunities as the year draws to a close.  There are book contests that seem interesting still, like the Wilder Prize at Two Sylvias Press.  At one point in the last few months (see this blog post), I thought about revising the last manuscript of poems that I created in 2019.  I even printed the table of contents to see which poems have been published since I last sent out the manuscript, and I made a list of new poems to include.  I put question marks by the poems I might take out to make room for the new.  I thought I would change the title and have the manuscript ready by mid-December, so I could send it to a few contests.

But this morning, I have a different vision.  I'm going to wait until summer to do a deeper dive into manuscript assembly.  I'm going to create a new manuscript called Higher Ground.  The title works on several levels with the climate change poems along with spirituality poems.  I'm going to let the idea percolate as I send out poems for publication and think about the larger themes of my body of poems.  I think it will be a much stronger manuscript if I take this different approach of creating something new, not grafting onto the old.

I am aware that I may only have a chance to publish one book with a spine when it comes to poetry, given my age and how long it takes to move a poetry book manuscript from submission to publication.  So I want it to be good work on several levels:  the best poetry that I have written, the poems that work as a cohesive whole in the best way.

This morning I decided to submit some individual poems to journals whose submission windows close soon.  As I do this, I update my submission log, which I don't always do when the rejections come in, which means I miss a few.  Today, along with a rejection, a request to submit during the narrow window in December when the journal is open for submissions.

Happily, I hadn't missed the opportunity, so I submitted right away, before I lost momentum.

And now it's off for a very full day of volunteer work.  I'm going to help the group that builds the set for "Return to Bethlehem," zip over for quilt group from 1:30 -3:30 or so, and then back to the Bethlehem set.

Noah's Wife Reads the Realtor.com Listings

It's a climate change/catastrophe winter break, in terms of my reading.  I zoomed through Ian McEwin's What We Can Know--in some ways, it's a literary mystery, but it's set in the future, after various climate catastrophes have changed the coming 100 years.  Yesterday, I started Joe Mungo Reed's Terrestrial History, which also travels back and forth in future years.  Both books are compelling in so many ways, and I'm so happy to find myself consumed by real reading again, not just doomscrolling.

Of course, the doomscrolling habits are hard to quit.

Those of you who know me, either in person or through this blog, know that climate change/catastrophe is never far from my brain.  This morning I read this article about German scientists sound the alarm about the apparent speeding up of warming--we might be to 3 degrees of increased temperature by 2050, not by the end of the century.

You might say, "Wait, I thought we had agreements that would allow us to avoid these outcomes."  Well, yes, if we actually did what we all had agreed to do.  And frankly, even with those agreements, followed to the letter, we'd have been cutting it close.

This morning, I found myself entering our South Florida zip code into Realtor.com, and scrolling through.  I'm always on the lookout for our old house to reappear.  This morning, it wasn't that house, but two houses across the street from our old house.  Hmm.  

And then I searched for the house itself, which is listed as a place we could rent for just $5,295 a month.  Are there really renters who can afford such a rent?  It's an apartment.com listing, so not a short term rental site from what I can tell.

Perhaps there are not renters who can/want to afford this rent.  It's been vacant since August--and probably before that.  It's been off and on the market since we sold it, and I don't think anyone has stayed there much.  It was listed as a short-term rental, then for sale, and now as a longer term rental.  I scrolled through the pictures and felt a bit of sadness at all the updates that we did that have been ripped out or covered over.  I have fallen into this pit of despair before, and always, there is this voice in my head saying, "Honestly, Kristin, you were lucky to escape with most of your possessions and a profit on the house sale."

And along with that voice of reason this morning, my muse chimed in, with her gentle reminder that I am writing a series of poems in the voice of Noah's wife (yes, the Biblical Noah who built an ark).  I am still working on it, but I am pleased with this vision of Noah's wife consulting the realtor sites and wondering if they made a mistake even as she is sure that they are safer now.

What a lovely way to salvage the spiral that the Realtor.com site often inspires!

Week-End Update: Cooking and Other Types of Mood Management

In some ways, it was a good week-end.  Sunday at Faith Lutheran in Bristol, Tennessee went well, the kind of Sunday where I find myself wishing this position as a Synod Appointed Minister could continue for several more years.  It might, but much of that decision will not be up to me.

It was the kind of week-end where I hear about the travel plans of neighbors and feel a weird sense of emotion.  It's not envy, exactly.  They're taking a 10 day walk across England, 7-8 miles a day, carrying everything they need on their backs, following the same path that the pilgrim's in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales traveled.  They are at least 10 years older than I am, maybe 15.  It's the kind of plan that makes me wonder if I should retire/work less now rather than later.  But I am not sure we could make this kind of trek now.  For one thing, the long airline flight to get there is a dealbreaker for me.  And my spouse would need a very flat route, and he would need to do some training to be ready for even a flat route.

So, not envy, but the kind of feeling I have had so often in my life, wondering what is wrong with me that I don't want what so many other people seem to want.  In the above paragraph, it's vacation plans and bucket lists.  I look at the larger culture, particularly the desire to have the latest cell phone and hours to spend scrolling, and I don't feel like something is wrong with me.  I do worry about the health of the larger culture, particularly when I stumble across particularly disturbing information about what tech is doing to our brains.

I organized a cookie tasting for our neighborhood group, and I tried to make a recipe, pecan sandies, from childhood.  As with the chocolate chip cookies I've tried to make, the butter seemed to melt outside the cookie and fry it.  Not untasty, but not the memory of the cookie.  And there was that distressing moment when I said, "I can't cook anymore."  A ridiculous thought, but a distressing one.

Yesterday, though, we had great success making pizza with cast iron pans.  Before putting them in the oven, I turned the burner to medium heat for 3 minutes, as recommended by this blog post from King Arthur Baking Company.  It was the first time since being in this house when we've had a good homemade pizza.  My usual experience is to go through all the effort to make homemade pizza, only to be left with a mess of a kitchen and a blah pizza and a yearning for pizza from somewhere else. 

Yesterday as we ate pizza, we watched the recording of the Sunday worship service at the National Cathedral.  The service was beautiful, and once again, I found myself observing a strange mood evolving in me.  There was some nostalgia for the year I spent in seminary, where I went to the Cathedral occasionally.  I felt nostalgia and wistfulness and sadness for a time that is gone and won't be coming back.  I felt fortunate to have had the experiences and the opportunities and at the same time, I know what I had planned to do with that time in the city and the ways I fell short.  I tried to keep focused on what I did manage to do.  

When the worship service was over, we switched to Saturday Night Live snippets, so it was easier to manage my mood.  And then it was off to bed; I've been going to sleep increasingly earlier, and I feel like I need to get back on a more reasonable track.

The Feast Day of Saint Nicholas

Today, all over Europe, the gift-giving season begins. I had a friend in grad school who celebrated Saint Nicholas Day by having each family member open one present on the night of Dec. 6. It was the first I had heard of the feast day, but I was enchanted.

Still, I don't do much with this feast day--if I had children or gift-giving friends, I might, but most years, I simply pause to remember the historical origins of the saint and the day.

This year, my neighborhood group is having a cookie/treat tasting.  It's not a cookie swap, which requires people to bring several dozen cookies to exchange.  No, we will bring a batch of cookies or treats of some sort and enjoy some time together, with treats to eat if we want.  We're doing it at one of the Lutheridge buildings, which means no host who had to clean their house.  

In different years, I might have spent some time looking at my own Santa objects, but they are all packed away while the house renovation continues.   Happily, I have pictures!

One year, my step-mom in law and my father in law gave me these as Christmas presents:

They're actually cookie presses, and the Santa figures are the handles of the press. I've never used them as a cookie press, but I love them as decorations that are faithful to the European country of origin.

It's always a bit of a surprise to realize that Saint Nicholas was a real person. But indeed he was. In the fourth century, he lived in Myra, then part of Greece, now part of Turkey; eventually, he became Bishop of Myra. He became known for his habit of gift giving and miracle working, although it's hard to know what really happened and what's become folklore. Some of his gift giving is minor, like leaving coins in shoes that were left out for him. Some were more major, like resurrecting three boys killed by a butcher.

My favorite story is the one of the poor man with three children who had no dowry for them. No dowry meant no marriage, and so, they were going to have to become prostitutes. In the dead of night, Nicholas threw a bag of gold into the house. Some legends have that he left a bag of gold for each daughter that night, while some say that he gave the gold on successive nights, while some say that he gave the gold as each girl came to marrying age.

Through the centuries, the image of Saint Nicholas has morphed into Santa Claus, but as with many modern customs, one doesn't have to dig far to find the ancient root.

I don't have as many Santa images in my Christmas decorations. Here's my favorite Santa ornament:

I picked it up in May of 1994 or so. I was visiting my parents, and I went with them on a trip to Pennsylvania where my dad was attending a conference. I picked this ornament up in a gift shop that had baskets of ornaments on sale. I love that it uses twine as joints to hold Santa together.

In the past decade, I've been on the lookout for more modern Saint Nicholas images. A few years ago, one of my friends posted this photo of her Santa display to her Facebook page:

I love the ecumenical nature of this picture of Santa: Santa statues coexisting peacefully with Buddha statues. And then I thought, how perfect for the Feast Day of St. Nicholas!

More recently, I have a new favorite Saint Nicholas image, courtesy of my cousin's wife:

In this image, Santa communicates by way of American Sign Language. As I looked at the background of the photo, I realized Santa sits in a school--the sign on the bulletin board announces free breakfast and lunch.

The photo seems both modern and ancient to me: a saint who can communicate in the language we will hear, the promise that the hungry will be filled.

In our time, when ancient customs seem in danger of being taken over by consumerist frenzy, let us pause for a moment to reflect on gifts of all kinds. Let us remember those who don't have the money that gifts so often require. Let us invite the gifts of communication and generosity into our lives.

Reading: Books, Skin, Weather Forecasts

Yesterday was an unexpected reading day.  I took Ian McEwan's What We Can Know with me to the dermatologist's office, and I did have time to start reading it.  It hooked me very early--it's a great concept, a book that takes place both in our time and a hundred years forward, with a literary mystery (a great poem that has disappeared).  It reminds me of A. S. Byatt's Possession, which I loved when I first read it but have never been able to make my way through again.

My dermatologist declared me to have passed my annual exam with flying colors, even as she zapped me with nitrogen for spot after spot and biopsied a spot.  She said I have beautiful skin, and I'm happy for compliments in my increasingly aging body.  I see all the splotches and stray hairs and scaly bits of my skin.

I got back home and still felt a bit off kilter, as I often do after a doctor or dentist visit.  So I sat at the computer, but I realized I still wanted to be reading, reading a book, not articles about our current time of politics on the computer.  So I switched.

My spouse was happy to be watching his Cops-like show, so I kept going.  I had bought some Peppermint Creme coffee at the Fresh Market on my way to the dermatologist.  The day was overcast, with the hope of afternoon snow.

Well, I had hope, even though the system was scheduled to come through later in the evening/overnight hours.  I got up this morning to cold rain instead, and I'm trying not to feel depressed about it.  I was looking forward to wintry weather on a day when I didn't have to be anywhere.  I can still cook the pot roast I bought yesterday, of course.  It will be just as good on a rainy day as it would be on a day with a wintry mix.

And there should be more time to read today--bliss!

Moonset and Midwinters

I often cannot see the night sky, here in the mountains of North Carolina.  There's usually too many trees that obscure the view, which seems a fair trade most nights.  But in the winter months of no leaves on the trees, I get unexpected treats as I glimpse a star here and there.

This morning there was the delight of the setting moon.  I was working on a poem that I was writing, a poem inspired by an in-class writing experiment that led to some good student writing (see this blog post for details).  I thought I might write from the point of view of the saw mill blade, but instead, I focused on the door frame, the door frame that was once a tree, that sacrificed essential parts of itself to become a door frame.  Was it worth it?  The door frame feels sorrow, much like many adults I know who feel sorrow about the sacrifices made along the way.

As I was writing it, the poem seemed tired and trite to me.  Writing about it now, I think it has potential.  I'll put it away for a bit and see if anything new comes to me.

As I was writing, the setting moon caught my eye, and I thought, I'd probably see this beautiful moon better if I turned off the lights in this room.  And so, I did, and it was amazing, watching the moon set beyond the bare branches of the trees.  The moon was shrouded in haze, so it had more of a Halloween vibe than a December vibe.  I tried to summon a December feeling by thinking about the haunting Christmas hymn, "In the Deep Midwinter."  I thought about Christina Rossetti, author of the words.

I wrote this Facebook post:   "The moon is setting to the west, and I see it through the bare branches of the trees, and I hum a bit of "In the Bleak Midwinter," and think about Christina Rossetti's underappreciated brilliance, like the brilliance of the moon, reflecting the light of those Pre-Raphaelites, transforming that light into something far more focused and incisive."

I thought about trying to take a picture to go with the Facebook post, but my phone isn't as advanced as those that other people have.  The picture would have been more spooky than wintry, if it captured anything much at all.

And now the mountains are the rosy purple of reflected sunrise.  And now it is time to get back to grading, a constant for the next few days.

First Week of December Thoughts on Year End Lists and More

I had every intention of writing yesterday; after all, I had a largely unstructured day, since my ear doctor appointment got moved from Tuesday to Monday.   I had every intention of walking too.  

And how did my day get away from me?  I should be more specific--my mornings are the times when I have plans for getting things done.  Yesterday I started baking because we had the idea of sending a care package to a nephew who is studying for final exams.  I kept baking, and when my spouse was at the dentist, I wanted to enjoy having the house to myself, so I didn't go for a walk.  I was making progress on the endless grading that is constant at the end of the term, so I kept going.

By later in the day, after I got back from the post office and the library, it was windy, so I decided to hunker down, watch T.V., and sew some quilt squares.

Let me record some thoughts from the past few days:

--I was sad to hear about the death of Tom Stoppard and astonished to realize that he was 88 years old.  I had forgotten that he wrote the screenplay to Shakespeare in Love.  If I ever get to teach the Brit Lit survey class again, I'll end by having us watch that movie in its entirety.  It's an interesting counterpoint to Waiting for Godot--in some sense, it's in the absurdist line of theatre, but it's also different in ways that make sense as a way to close the course.  It looks both forward and backward, and it's a work from 1999, which gets me closer to the 21st century than I got this year, when I ended with Waiting for Godot.  I feel vaguely guilty for ending the course in the 1950's, and showing a film that features a Stoppard screenplay would alleviate my guilt.

--I went to the post office yesterday expecting a big crowd--it is early December, after all.  Happily there was only one person already at the counter and then me in line.  I bought some holiday stamps, even though I already have plenty of stamps.  I thought of my grandfather, my mom's dad, who collected stamps and taught me how to do it.  I wondered if anyone still collects stamps.

--We've been binge watching NYPD Blue.  I am using the term binge watching perhaps differently than some do, especially when talking about a series that lasted from 1993 until 2005.  It's a show we return to, but it's easy to dip in and out.  There are enough story lines that go across episodes that make me want to return to it.  It's well written and well acted, and it seems as worthy of attention as any of the "prestige TV" shows that aired on HBO in the past decades.  I watched it for a few years when it first aired, but I don't remember much of it.  Because it was a weekly show that was on the air for so long, there's a lot to watch, and we are watching it on a channel that just runs the show, episode after episode, so we can't pause the series.

--I am looking at a variety of year-end Best of _____ lists.  I'm no longer surprised when I haven't heard of most of the movies on the list.  But this year I'm surprised how few of the books crossed my radar screen until landing on the year end list.  And many of the ones that are on the list that I've heard of are ones I didn't like.  Hmm.

--Yesterday I took our Thanksgiving hambone and turned it into a pot of bean soup--what alchemy!  For decades when I cooked vegetarian beans, there would always be someone who asked what gave them flavor without the pork.  I never understood the question until a few years ago when I got to take the hambone home.

Reading Day, 2025

If you came to this blog hoping that you'd find a meditation on World AIDS Day or the anniversary of Rosa Parks refusing to give up her bus seat to a white passenger in 1955, head over this post on my theology blog.  I did some brief researching of AIDS statistics, which are sobering:   according to a UN Fact Sheet, 1.3 million people worldwide contracted AIDS in 2024 alone--that's just one year. Since the beginning of this epidemic, 91.4 million people have been infected, and 44.1 million have died of the disease.

Today will be a different work day for me.  My students at Spartanburg Methodist College have a reading day today, followed by several days of final exams, but I don't have to report to campus. Grades are due at SMC on Dec. 8, and Dec. 10 for my online classes. So I have lots of grading this week, but it will feel easy because there's no commuting to Spartanburg.

This morning felt luxurious in some ways:  I can put off my walk until later in the morning, so I've had a slower morning than most Mondays have been.  I'm trying not to think about next semester, where I'll have a class that starts at 9, so Mondays won't be slow-paced at all.  Maybe I will keep an extra pair of sneakers in my office and go for my walk later in the mornings on MWF.  I won't get much in the way of hill training, but it would be good to have that option.

I will start grading later.  Today is one of the few days where I don't have meetings or appointments scheduled, so I'm trying to savor the slowness.

I still have that hollow-brained feeling when it comes to composing poems, but I do have the capacity to read.  Earlier this semester, I heard the author Richard Osman interviewed on NPR, in advance of the Netflix version of his book, The Thursday Murder Club, the book which is now a series of books.  I hadn't heard of any of it before, but the interview whetted my appetite.  The book is just as delightful as I hoped it would be.

Yesterday my spouse was sewing on the machine, which meant that watching TV wasn't really possible.  I decided to put away my sewing, switch to Christmas music on Spotify, and sink into that book.  It was a wonderful part of the afternoon.

Tomorrow I'll go get the next batch of books that I've ordered from the public library--next up will be Ian McEwan's latest, which has gotten great reviews.  I'll read it first, since I suspect I won't be able to renew it.

A reading day, a holiday spent reading--delightful!

Balancing Acts in the Time to Come

In some ways, life returns to normal today.  We are headed across the mountains soon, so I can preach and preside at Faith Lutheran's worship service which begins at 10, with Confirmation at 9.  There may have been some freezing precipitation in the highest elevations, but it looks like the worst stayed to the east.

In some ways, normal life is on vacation until mid-January when I report back to campus at Spartanburg Methodist College.  I'm not done with my teaching life--no, in some ways, it's getting even more intense, as all the classes that I teach, in person and online, come to a crashing close at the same time, with grades due within 24 hours of each other.  But I won't be commuting.

In the time freed up by not commuting, I hope to have a bit of writing time in the next week, along with some reading time.  I hope to redistribute the creative energy that is so often spent on planning for daily classes to writing new poems.

I know that I tend to overschedule myself in these weeks off because I'm trying to make up for lost time.  I did not have much time off this summer, which makes my need to catch up with friends even more intense, along with my need for down time.

It's a delicate balancing act, and I hope to be intentional about the balancing.

Thanksgiving History in Fabric Scraps

Here I sit, at the kitchen table of the big, ramshackle house at Lutheridge, the church camp where my family has always had our holiday festivities (well, since 1992 or so), the house where we’ve assembled for at least 20 years.  It was at this table, on the Saturday of Thanksgiving week-end in 2022, where I first assembled the log cabin patch out of scraps, and I’ve been doing it ever since, and may just continue to do it until my fingers won’t let me.

It has been a great Thanksgiving this year, although zooming by too fast, and I know I likely say that every year.  This year, all the members of the next generation are teenagers now, which brings a certain sadness about all the books we’re not reading about giving a mouse a cookie or llamas in pajamas.

 Happily, there are other joys.  We spent much of the week-end helping the oldest teenager in the house with a project she envisioned:  letters made of fabric scraps, sewed on a sweatshirt.  When my cousin wrote me in advance and told me what she had in mind, I brought all my fabric scraps with me.

 

 

The project became a bit bigger than we first thought it would be.  She chose small squares, and we made them into larger squares of four patches; then we made took the template she’d made of paper letters and cut out the fabric.  We used the Steam-a-seam product to make sure the letters didn’t move around.

 

 

And what do you know—it worked!  It looked very much like the picture that had provided the inspiration, and she was very happy with it.  The whole family had a great spirit going in, and they assured my spouse and me (mostly me) that whatever happened would be fine.  I was worried about a ruined sweatshirt and the crushing of creative dreams—I’m so happy that didn’t happen.  The oldest teenager was so happy with her creation that she wore it on the long car trip home.  I wish we had had more time to sew the letters to the sweatshirt, but she knows how to do it, and her mom knows some folks who will help, and in the meantime, they won’t wash the sweatshirt.

In a way, that’s a metaphor for the whole holiday time together—the worry that the experience won’t live up to expectations, the happiness of time together, the realization that it’s all going to be O.K., even if not exactly perfect.

                                                                                                           

Thanksgiving Morning

Thanksgiving morning, in a house with no wi-fi, and a writer determined not to use her hot spot until the last possible minute because she, unlike much of the U.S.A. does not want to pay for unlimited data on her cell phone. But she knows what to do. And so she writes the old-fashioned way, typed in a Word document that will be uploaded later.

You thought the writer might use a pen? She’s not that old-fashioned—she still has electricity! And she’s willing to pay for the version of Microsoft Office that’s always available, regardless of Internet access.

That writer, of course, is me. I’m being cautious with my cell phone usage because one past Thanksgiving of reckless abandon showed me how much data can cost, when I left the hot spot function on overnight. I am educable.

But I’m also delighting in disconnecting. I’ve gotten a sermon written in the past hour since I got up. If I’d had connectivity, I’d have spent that hour looking at stuff on the Internet, and likely feeling dispirited. Now I am feeling virtuous!

Long ago, I did write with a pen and paper, and I do remember that I had to fend off distractions then, too. Back in those days, I might be tempted to read the newspaper before I started—the old-fashioned kind, that arrived on the doorstep, not on my computer screen. The world is always trying to pull us away or lull us into complacency or sedate us—or terrify us or make us feel inadequate.

Let me take a moment before Thanksgiving starts in earnest, a moment to remember some of the wonderful events that have already happened:

--We have managed to gather at the ramshackle house at Lutheridge where we have gathered almost every year since 1992.

--Not everyone could come. But we had new participants—yesterday my mom and uncle’s cousin’s wife came over for a wonderful afternoon of talking and reminiscing.

--The babies that I once read to are now teenagers. They are grown but not gone yet. They have interests (fabric! Cooking! Getting ready for Christmas!) that intersect with mine. What a delight.

--We did not gather at this house last year because of hurricane damage from Helene. I have not looked out of these windows at Thanksgiving until this year, although I was in the house in September. In September, the view was obscured by the trees still in full leaf. Now that the leaves are down, I’m sobered by how few trees are actually there.

--It is also sobering to think about how much older we all are. On the other side of the spectrum from babies grown into teenagers are the rest of the family, with a variety of health challenges.

But for today, we are here, the house is still here, and we will celebrate that fact with food, my favorite meal of the whole year.

Gratitude Tuesday: British Lit, Teaching, and the Larger Perspective

This morning, I'm trying to remember to do my writing first before going to teaching duties.  Yesterday I did grading for my online classes; I thought I was caught up with grading late work, only to discover that I had some more to do.  It's not a huge deal--it's late work, after all, so students should have no expectation of timely grading.  But the term is ending soon, so there's some pressure, all self-imposed, because the semester isn't ending that soon.

In short, I was in a sour mood yesterday.  That's not the reason I didn't do any blogging.  I didn't do any blogging because time just zoomed away from me.

I went to school yesterday, and had a good in-person teaching day.  My English 101 class got their final exam writing assignment and settled in to write--they are one of the best classes I've ever had about settling in to a writing day.

My British Lit class was wonderful in a different way.  I did a variation of an in-person final exam that I did in the spring with my American Lit class (see this blog post for more information).  My Brit Lit class is much smaller, so I skipped some steps.  First I had them write their top 5 list, the 5 works we studied which most inform their understanding of the world today, the top 5 list of works that they would keep on the syllabus.  Then I had them divide into 2 groups of 4 students.  Each group made a group list and put it on the board at the same time.

Both groups had Frankenstein at the #1 spot, which I expected.  I was happy that both groups also included "Goblin Market" and Mrs. Dalloway.  We had a good discussion about the similarities in the works and the differences.  One group also included Wollstonecraft's "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman" for similar reasons.  That group's fifth work was "Porphyria's Lover," which led to a great discussion of new ways of telling stories and creating characters, like the dramatic monologue--new ways which are as old as literature, in many ways.  

The other group chose Dorothy Wordsworth's journal, which made me happy and led to a conversation about women's lives and ordinary lives being seen as important--links to Mrs. Dalloway.  The other group also chose Dickens' "A Christmas Carol," mainly for ways it shows the way the past affects the present--good insights that the student who advocated for it came up with on his own.

We also talked about works that we didn't cover deeply or much at all, and what might be included next time.  One of my students suggested Jane Austen, and I said that I had also been thinking about adding Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre.  I also mentioned that Sense and Sensibility is coming back to the big screen for one day only and recommended it.  I may have waxed too enthusiastic about Emma Thompson, saying, "If Emma Thompson came through that door right now and said, 'Come away with me right now, and we'll make wonderful movies,' I would leave without a second thought.  Would I go get my purse?  Yes, probably."  And then we talked about big name British actors of the 1990's for a few minutes, and then I turned our attention back again to the work of the course.

I feel very lucky to be teaching this next generation of students at Spartanburg Methodist College.  They give me hope for the future.  They have a wide range of interests:  I'm thinking about my Brit Lit students who had a great conversation about musical theatre when I asked them about the direction of theater after "Waiting for Godot."  They've been good sports about my cell phones in class ban.  They're respectful, even as they question what the larger world wants them to believe.  

I've got one more class day, today, wrapping up three classes, and then it's on to Thanksgiving and exams.  I don't need to report to campus for exams, another aspect of life that makes me feel very lucky.  So much gratitude here in this week as we dash to Thanksgiving and beyond!

Book Buyers on Campus

On Friday afternoon, I noticed a stranger in the office suite.  No one seemed alarmed, so I thought maybe he was expected.  He wore slightly better clothing than our usual student visitors.  A job candidate, perhaps?  But surely not on a Friday afternoon, which is not a high traffic time on campus.  A former department member?  Maybe--but it would be going way back, because I hadn't heard of an older white man as a former department member.

In the end, he turned out to be a book buyer, the kind who goes from campus to campus, looking for old textbooks to buy.  The business model used to be that he'd buy them for slightly more than one could get at the campus bookstore.  Now campus bookstores have a much smaller footprint, and many college teachers are using online textbooks, open source material, or no text at all.  

I'm a little surprised that there's enough of a market that someone would still put on their better clothes and trudge from building to building with a rolling suitcase for the books to be bought.  But I'm also happy.

And yes, I realize all the reasons why this shadow economy is bad for book writers and students and textbook companies.  But I'm also happy.

Homespun and Spinning of All Sorts

My writing time is about out--but happily, I've written a rough draft of Sunday's sermon.  And I didn't have a unified blog post in mind.  Let me just collect some fragments.

--I've now had two days of commutes back home with construction and 2 days of commutes back home without construction.  The days without construction feel like I fly home.

--The local (Anderson, SC) classic rock radio station, 101.1, has a promo going from Nov. 17-21, where they are playing classic rock, A-Z, with songs from each letter of the alphabet, along with an obligatory contest (each time the alphabet letter changes, one can text for a chance to win tickets to a concert).  So on my Monday commute home, I heard Steely Dan's "Deacon Blues," and on yesterday's, we were to the G's, with the Who's "Getting in Tune."  These are songs that I haven't heard in decades, and yet I can still sing along.

--I realize that radio stations these days have programming done from a central location, but it still makes me happy to listen to a list like this one.  It makes me happy to have a d.j. who says, "This one is my favorite Steely Dan song" and goes on to give some human sounding reasons and memories.  I am guessing that in the future I'll be hearing a chatbot pretending to be a human in the not too distant future, if there are any radios with d.j.s at all.

--We've been watching the new Ken Burns documentary about the Revolutionary War; we've finished the second episode.  It's not all brand new to me; I went to K-12 schools that spent a lot of our time in history classes studying this time period.  But it's put together in interesting ways with intriguing synthesis and analysis of what it means to us today.  

--As we've been watching, I've been sewing by hand, putting scraps together into log cabin patterns.  I have numb finger tips because I've been sewing a lot more this week.

--As I listened to the segment on the resistance of colonial women who decided to weave their own cloth (homespun!) and take themselves out of the King's economy, I thought about the gorgeous fabrics moving through my hands.  I feel like there should be a poem there, but I'm not sure, so let me record it.

--Today is an easier day at work--it's a writing day for my students, which can be done in class or outside of class.  I'm available in my office.  It's an approach that I've adopted from my colleagues, so I'm not going to be seen as slacking off.  Most places where I have worked would not have approved of the need for this kind of "let's get caught up" kind of day.  I'm glad to be here.

--And there's a Town Hall in the middle of it, the monthly update from the president, the meeting that has coffee and food beforehand.  I am so happy to be at a place that keeps us updated and keeps us fed and caffeinated along the way.  I'm so happy to be at a place that trusts faculty members.

Various Patricia Smiths and Various Strands of a Life

I have spent some time this morning listening to Patricia Smith's acceptance speech for the National Book Award for poetry; another poet pasted it in a Facebook post.  I went to the website where one could watch the whole ceremony (here), but instead, I'm listening to Ezra Klein's interview with Patti Smith--the more famous Patti Smith, the godmother of punk, the author of Just Kids, along with more recent books.

Back to the poet Patricia Smith, who was the only poet of all the nominees whose work I had read (go here for the full list).  I hadn't even heard of the poets nominated until they were nominated.  Some years are like that.  But happily, I have heard of Patricia Smith; I remember a presentation she did at an AWP conference, probably as far back as the one in D.C. in 2011.  I probably wouldn't have discovered her book Blood Dazzler on my own without hearing her talk about it at her presentation.  It showed me what poetry could do, and I'm glad she's now gained wider recognition for her poetry.

And now I've done what I've always done:  I looked up her birth date.  She's ten years older than I am.  I read her whole Wikipedia entry, and of course, she had a lot of writing history before Blood Dazzler.

This morning before I got up out of bed, I was thinking of my novel idea that I had earlier this year which I wrote about in this blog post:  " a new narrative that might weave the voice of an older woman in seminary, a younger woman teaching section after section of freshman comp in a community college, a middle aged woman struggling to write poems around the edges of her administrator job--and yes, they would all be me."

Because I've been rereading The Hours and teaching Waiting for Godot, this morning, even before I got out of bed, I was thinking about that idea, about a poet who is closer to the end of her life than the beginning (age 60-70), who finally gets big recognition.  Maybe her first and only book with a spine is the one which wins the big award (a Pulitzer or a National Book Award, something bigger than publication alone).  Different life phases could represent different theological/philosophical positions on life.  For example, the administrator job is the Waiting for Godot existence, where so much seems meaningless.

Some things I might include (but not saying too much here, so as not to lose my writerly interest):  the young poet, pre-chapbook-publication, reading May Sarton's journals and marveling at her envy of other poets despite her own success.  The late life poet, getting ready for the awards ceremony, trying to decide what to wear, and she remembers long ago how she had planned out what she would wear should Oprah chose her book for Oprah's book club.  All that "manifesting," but no one tells you how long it might take for a dream to actually arrive.  A book of photographs of writer's studios or that book of interviews, Parting the Curtains, and feeling jealous of the amount of time that writers in the book have--and then, 30 years later, realizing that she has carved out time for much of her adult life by getting up at 3 or 4 in the morning.  Reading Kathleen Norris and wanting to go to a monastery, and all the other more rigorous religious traditions contemplated.

Could I weave these strands together in a compelling way?  Will I?

These days I am feeling my writing time drained away not by non-writing tasks, the way I did when I was an administrator.  These days, my writing time is drained away by things like sermon writing.  Let me turn my attention to that.

Scraps Before Thanksgiving

I am feeling like my attention span has been ripped into scraps.  I'm not too worried.  It's that time of year:  close to the end of the term, but not quite there yet.  Let me record some scraps that I want to remember.

--It has been a week of very long commutes back from Spartanburg Methodist College.  On Thursday, there was a terrible wreck that shut down the interstate.  On Monday and Tuesday there was road construction on the westbound side of I 26, my fastest route home.  On Monday, I got off at the Saluda, NC exit, and took the winding road up to Hendersonville, a road also under construction.  Yesterday I took SC 11, the Cherokee Foothills Scenic Highway, over to Highway 25, a much easier trip.  It still takes longer than I 26 when there's no construction on the interstate.  When there is construction, heading cross country is much easier.

--The long commute does leave me even more tired than usual.  I have decided that I just don't care--I'm going to bed when I'm tired.  So last night, I fell asleep at 7.

--I've been texting with my uncle and cousin about Thanksgiving.  We've strategized food, of course.  My cousin's daughter wants to do something with fabric scraps and a sweatshirt.  I plan to show her all of my fabric stash and let her have fun.  I'll also explore my new sewing machine.

--I started reading Michael Cunningham's The Hours again last night.  Yes, I read it back in May (according to my Books Read 2025 document).  But reading and discussing Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway in my British Literature class made me want to read it again.  So yesterday, when I was at the library, I checked it out again.  What a delight of a book!

--We finally had a plumber come out yesterday to fix things that seemed beyond our capabilities.  Did you know that wax rings for toilets come in different sizes?  I did not.  I realize that most people can go their whole lives without even knowing the inner workings of a toilet.  Some days, I envy them.

--I'm told we now have two working showers.  But the hall shower will always be my favorite.  We chose tile for it that still takes my breath away in certain lights.

--In past houses, the slow pace of home repair aggravated me.  In this house, I find myself not caring.  It's a pleasant aspect of late midlife that few people mention:  many things that once aggravated me or took up lots of brain space no longer concern me.

Watching "Waiting for Godot" Again, with a New Generation of Brit Lit Students

Yesterday I showed my British Literature class the first 40 minutes of Waiting for Godot; that's likely all we'll watch because to show the whole thing would wipe out a week.  And frankly, 40 minutes is about all we need to get a taste of theatre of the absurd, and yes, I realize that in some ways, we're not getting the full experience at all.

This morning I was trying to remember when I last showed this play to students, and I think it was as long ago as 1997 or 1998.  I didn't show the play when I taught the survey class at the University of Miami.  That syllabus shows that we did Beckett's End Game, which would have been in the Norton Anthology in the early years of this century.  Also, I didn't have an easy way to show classes anything.  

Even in the 90's, when I worked at a community college, it wasn't easy to show anything.  I had to go to the library to check out a TV and VCR that were bolted to a rolling cart, which I would then wheel across campus to the classroom.  Then after class, I would wheel it back (and part of the year, that meant wheeling it back after dark, across parking lots and sidewalks).

It was so much easier yesterday, with the ability to stream a YouTube video on the big screen that's part of the classroom, and happily, the technology didn't fail me.  But was it any easier to watch in terms of content?

I've always found Beckett a mix:  delightful, absurd, disturbing, and on some level, boring, despite being also profound.  Yesterday was about the same for me, although as I watched, I did see a new interpretation, as I have more experience with aging.  It's hard for me to watch this and not jump to a dementia interpretation, although that interpretation is new to me, and I don't think it's what Beckett intended.

Tomorrow, my Brit Lit class will do a different type of debate--both sides will argue that the play is brilliant.  It's too easy to argue that it's not brilliant.  I'll put them in 2 groups and see if they can come up with reasons why it's brilliant, why I'm showing them this play, some 73 years after it premiered.

Making Applesauce, Making Poems

I ended up doing a lot of cooking on Saturday, which was both restorative and necessary.  I needed to make bread for communion and to make applesauce to use up the apples that were past their prime.  I also made a wonderful seafood-fennel soup, which requires lots of chopping (the recipe is in this blog post, if you scroll down; I usually make it with canned clams, frozen shrimp, and frozen white fish of some bland variety).

I had forgotten how much effort it is to make applesauce, but it was worth the effort.  I left it lumpy, because some of the apples just refused to cook down.  A little texture is fine, right?

I had a bit of the applesauce in my oatmeal this morning--the most superb way to have apples in oatmeal!

I also returned to the beginning of a poem that I started on Saturday.  I had a first line:  At the end of the season, we make applesauce.  I made a poem out of all the apple-related cooking we thought we would do.  On Saturday, I thought it was rather blah, not saying anything of any importance at all.  This morning, I thought it was a great way of talking about all the plans that we have that collapse for any number of reasons.

I'm still working on it.  I'm in that phase where I wonder if it needs more, but I want to be careful, because I know that I tend to write poems that explain too much.

This week is my last week of going to campus every week day for this semester.  Next week, we have two class days, and then we're off for Thanksgiving.  After that, students have final exams, and we're allowed to work remotely.  I am ready for a schedule that involves a bit less driving.

Making Applesauce, Losing Time

At some point today, I should probably make applesauce out of the remainder of the bushel of apples that I bought.  Two weeks ago, I bought cottage cheese, thinking I would be making applesauce soon.  It's still good.

Two weeks from now, Thanksgiving will be over, and my family will be departing.  I know that I will look back longingly, wishing I could redo the stretch of holidays over again.  In some ways, I feel similarly about the month of October.  What a delight that month was.  Of course, September was also lovely.  What a great autumn I have had.

----

I went to write a poem about making applesauce, and my morning writing time has evaporated into the blare of TV noise and Saturday schedules ahead.  But I'll go ahead and post this unfinished writing.

A Day that Is Less Idyllic: Active Shooter Training and Travel Delays

In case my life seems too idyllic, let me record the events of yesterday, so that I remember that it's not all uplifting teaching and preaching with poetry and sermon writing.  And let me spoil the suspense by saying it was all minor stuff really, in the longer range view.  But it made for a very long day.

I had to leave early because yesterday was the last scheduled day of Active Shooter training that we're all required to take.  This year, because we're shifting to a new system, we had to actually find 2 hours when we could sit in an auditorium to be trained in what to do if an active shooter comes to our campus.  Yesterday was the only training time, and there were many, which didn't conflict with a class that I was teaching.  I needed to be in the auditorium by 9, and I knew that there was road construction, so I left by 7:30--happily, there was no road construction.

In so many ways, this Active Shooter training never changes.  The only change that was mentioned is that past trainings told us that hiding was an option, but we want to move away from that thinking, because if the shooter finds our hiding place, there's no escape.

I wrote to a grad school friend while the training was happening--a real old-fashioned letter written by hand on paper.  I didn't want to try to balance a laptop on the auditorium chair without a desk, but writing a letter was doable.  I wanted to write to someone who would share my being aghast and sad at the thought that we now need this training.  Our grad school selves would never believe it.

I went on to have a good teaching day and headed to the car, ready to go home for a quick supper before a Zoom call to help with retreat planning.  It was not to be.

My commute usually takes no more than an hour.  Three hours later, I was still sitting on I 26, occasionally moving an inch or two.  I thought I was in some road construction hell, but it turned out to be a horrible accident that had shut down the interstate.  I sent a text to one of my fellow retreat planners to let her know that I wouldn't be at the meeting.

I got home to my supper which was cozy and lovely, and then I went straight to bed.  Happily, there was no reason that I needed to keep muscling through the day.

As I said, as bad days go, it could have been much worse.  I am now trained for an active shooter event, training that I don't expect to ever need to use.  I do understand all the liability reasons why schools want us to get this training.  

Bookending my day was the road accident, but it was not my accident.  I saw the smashed cars when I finally drove past, and I said a prayer for the victims, along with a prayer of thanks that it only impacted me in inconvenience, not in something more essential.

In Praise of Untidy Women: Teaching "Mrs. Dalloway"

This morning, I was thinking of the last time I taught Mrs. Dalloway.  I know that I didn't teach it when I was just out of grad school, that first job at Trident Technical College in South Carolina.  I thought I might have taught it when I taught the survey classes at the University of Miami; I have a memory of reading the paperback on the Miami Metro as I commuted back in the years 2000-2001.  

But this morning, I went to my computer file called "Old Computer," to the Teacher Stuff file in that Old Computer file.  Sure enough, there was an old syllabus from the turn of the century, a syllabus which shows that I did not teach Mrs. Dalloway.  

I think I was thinking of adding Mrs. Dalloway to the syllabus, but I might have been re-reading it during my long commute on public transportation because I had just read Michael Cunningham's The Hours.  Back in those days, the only Virginia Woolf selections in the Norton Anthology were her nonfiction.

This morning, I'm reflecting on age and teaching, age and literary characters.  Clarissa Dalloway is 52 years old.  If I had taught this book back in 2000, I'd have been closer to young Clarissa Dalloway than Clarissa Dalloway at midlife.  Now, I am 8 years older than Clarissa Dalloway in the book.

As I have re-read chunks of the book this past week, I've been struck by how Clarissa Dalloway's thoughts move back and forth in time.  But I do wonder if my students, who are the same age as young Clarissa, find it as compelling as I do.  After teaching the book yesterday, I spent a good chunk of my drive home feeling this fierce yearning for my girlhood self and all her friends.  In my case, it's more poignant because so many of my high school female friends have died.  They won't be crashing any dull parties that I might give, the way that Sally arrives uninvited at the end of the novel.

I really loved the descriptions of the young Sally Seton with this reading; I don't remember loving her as fiercely in past readings as I have been now.  I love that one of young Clarissa's older aunts calls Sally "untidy."

With this reading, I'm also struck by how the Peter Walsh character is the one who is much more stuck in adolescence than the two women, Sally and Clarissa.  He still yearns for them, and I suspect he's primarily yearning for the women that they were, or the women that he thought they were.  And I'm feeling slightly guilty, because I'm not spending much time on reading the Septimus passages, although I do circle back to discussing him.

In my morning meanderings, I came across this article in the New York Times, Michael Cunningham reflecting on Mrs. Dalloway.  My writing time draws to a close, so I'll conclude using Cunningham's conclusion:  "“Mrs. Dalloway” would be a book about a London that had been changed forever, superimposed over a London determined to get back to business as usual, as quickly as possible. Clarissa would stand in for all those who still believed in flowers and parties; Septimus for those who’d been harmed beyond any powers of recovery. The novel would also mark the early period of a literary career that would change forever the ways in which novels are written, and read. It’s an intricately wrought portrait of a place and a moment, and a stunningly acute depiction of the multifarious experience of living a life, anywhere, at any time."

Quilt Camp Homily: the Prophetess Anna and Our Quilting/Spiritual Life

I gave the homily for our Saturday night Quilt Camp closing worship.  I wanted to take a minute and make a record of the experience before it slips away.

Our Bible verse for the overall retreat was Psalm 91: 4, and during the evening devotional time of the first two nights, we focused on the first part, about God covering us with God's feathers and sheltering us beneath wings.  We talked about wings and feathers and angels.  We had a prayer board in the shape of wings, and we had feathers where we wrote prayers.

I wanted my homily to go in a slightly different direction--what happens when we don't feel that sheltering space?  What happens when it looks like everyone else's prayers get answered and not ours?  How many of us feel too old for whatever might have once seemed to make us special?

We had begun the retreat by talking about where we had sensed the presence of angels, and I started my sermon by talking about the angel Gabriel appearing to Mary, but that's really a young person's story.  Can you imagine if Gabriel came to any of us with that possibility?  We'd say, "Hmm, mother of the Messiah--not really my calling thanks."  

So I thought about other people who make an appearance in our Advent and Christmas texts.  I thought about Elizabeth, who gets to be the mother of John the Baptist.  But she doesn't even get the angel message herself; it comes through her husband, who laughs at the idea that his very old wife might have a baby.  He's struck mute through the whole pregnancy for his disbelief.  But it's still pregnancy, still not everyone's idea of fulfillment.

I continued:  I call your attention to a bit later in the story, when Joseph and Mary bring the baby Jesus to the Temple.  Simeon has been promised that he will not die without seeing the Messiah, and he holds the baby Jesus, holding the light of the world in his arms.  But I call your attention to Anna in Luke 2:  36-38 (I read the text).  We may think of Mary Magdalen as the first evangelist, the first to tell of the empty tomb, but I've come to think of Anna as the first, as she goes out to tell everyone about the Messiah.

Of course, it's sobering to realize that by the time the Gospel of Luke was written, that very Temple has been destroyed, and it will be thousands of years before there will be another one.

Then I took the turn to quilting:  it's a bit like quilting.  Some of us have everything we need, the right material, the sewing machine that is up to the job.  Other times, we discover we didn't buy enough cloth, and it's no longer available, and we have to figure out what to do.  There are times we are given a quilt started generations before, and it comes with no instructions, and we have to figure out a way.  And we, too, will die.  Maybe someone else will complete our projects, maybe not.  But we continue to do what we can do.

The life of faith is like this.  Some times, everything goes well.  Other times, the sewing machine explodes.  But we are in a group that can keep us going, keep us encouraged, help us solve the problems.

I concluded with what I think is the most important thing to remember:  when we feel abandoned by God or abandoned by our quilt group, we're not.  God is still there, although we may not be able to hear God.  Even someone like Mother Theresa has felt this way, as we discovered, when her letters were published after her death.  Some people thought her doubt diminished her, but I felt just the opposite, this relief that if even someone like Mother Theresa feels doubt, then I shouldn't feel alarm when I feel abandoned.

The trick is to keep going, keep working on our quilts, keep believing until the time when it isn't so hard to keep going.

As I delivered the homily, I noticed a few people wiping their eyes.  I noticed people smiling and nodding--happily, I didn't see any angry expressions.

I felt good about my homily, and I got good feedback, from people who appreciated the brevity to those who appreciated the message which gave them hope.  But most importantly, I feel that my homily spoke to those who were feeling loss and grief, emotions that are never very far away, especially for those of us who are on the older side of life.

Armistice Day with Monastic Poem

It has been many years since I was teaching the second half of British Literature in a Fall semester when Armistice Day/Veterans Day happens.  This year, I am.  We've already covered the material, although now we're discussing Mrs. Dalloway, a book which may be the first depiction of World War I caused PTSD in a novel.

I think it's hard for most of us to conceive of how many people died in World War I.  Even when I have my students imagine all of their male classmates going off to fight and no one coming back, I think it's hard to get our heads around the total.  I wish we could all go to the WWI cemeteries in France.  It's a visual that's tough to capture in a picture; it does make a very different impact.

Years ago, I was at Mepkin Abbey on Armistice Day.  It also happened to be near All Saints Sunday, the first All Saints Day after Abbot Francis Kline had been cruelly taken early by leukemia, and the Sunday we were there was the day of the memorial service for him. Part of one of the services was out in the monks' cemetery, and all the retreatants were invited out with the monks. I was struck by the way that the simple crosses reminded me of the French World War I cemeteries:

I took the above picture later from the visitor side of the grounds, but it gives you a sense of the burial area. I turned all these images in my head and wrote a poem, "Armistice Day at the Abbey."



 Armistice Day at the Abbey



The monks bury their dead on this slight
rise that overlooks the river
that flows to the Atlantic, that site
where Africans first set foot on slavery’s soil.

These monks are bound
to a different master, enslaved
in a different system.
They chant the same Psalms, the same tones
used for centuries. Modern minds scoff,
but the monks, yoked together
into a process both mystical and practical,
do as they’ve been commanded.

Their graves, as unadorned as their robes,
stretch out in rows of white crosses, reminiscent
of a distant French field. We might ponder
the futility of belief in a new covenant,
when all around us old enemies clash,
or we might show up for prayer, light
a candle, and simply submit.

Hinge Points of November

The wind is howling outside, and I'm trying not to be nervous.  Will it be better when the sun is up?  On the one hand, I'll be able to assess how much wind is actually blowing.  On the other hand, I'll be able to see the trees as they move in the wind.

I have a bagel toasting in the oven.  It's one of the bagels I bought on Wednesday when I went out to breakfast with some of the Quilt Camp leadership team.  I offered to bring a bagel or two with cream cheese back for my spouse.  It turned out to be cheaper to buy a dozen bagels, which are half off on Wednesdays, with a tub of cream cheese than to buy two individual bagels with cream cheese for him and one with cream cheese for me.

I am wishing it was a week ago, when I would still have the delights of quilt camp coming.  How wonderful that it was so wonderful!

It is hard to believe that a third of November has already zoomed by.  A week ago I'd be scrambling to make sure that everything was in place for me to be off campus from Wednesday to Friday.

Two weeks from now will be the last two days of regular class days.  Then we break for Thanksgiving.  After Thanksgiving is a reading day and then final exams.  I'm in that stage of the semester where it feels like we've been meeting together since the beginning of time, and we've covered all the important material.  But we still have two weeks together.

Two weeks from now we'll be getting ready for Thanksgiving, one of my favorite holidays.  I'll continue to try to savor every moment that remains of my favorite season, the one from early September to December 24.

Quilt Camp Ends

I did not mean to take a break from blogging.  In the past, I've often had time to blog, but this year, I was trying to get a sermon written and to keep up with all the classes I'm teaching, which meant I needed to log in periodically.  Other than those times, I haven't had the computer on at all, which has been heavenly in a way, in most ways.  I haven't had my usual early morning writing time because I've left the house just after 6 a.m. to open the Faith Center for early morning quilters--and this year, we had more early morning quilters show up than ever before.

Let me record some wonderful moments, and to note that there wasn't much in the way of any moments that were less than wonderful. 

--I am almost done repairing the old quilt that we've been sleeping under since 2005.  I still need to complete the binding on two sides, which is more complicated than it seems.  It's at the edges of the quilt that I need to make decisions about whether or not I cut the extra fabric or tuck it under the binding.  The edges are already thick with 4-7 layers of fabric from the old quilt.  

--My fingers ache.  I quit sewing yesterday when I realized that my forearms also hurt, and I worried a bit about feeling the twinges that could become carpal tunnel syndrome if I'm not careful.  I was thinking of a librarian-artist I knew who spent a week-end cutting paper for an installation art project and pushed on past the pain of her wrists and eventually needed surgery.

--I tried a variety of thimbles to protect the pads of my fingers.  The silicone one was best, except it still allowed the occasional needle stick.

--I will always sew by hand--it's a soothing thing to do while also having other activities going on, like TV watching or visiting with family.  But the day is likely upon us when I will stop doing some of the rest of it by hand, particularly for bed-size quilts.  One of my Quilt Camp buddies told me about a woman who will do some basic quilting with her long arm machine and even provide the batting, for just $100.00.  It sounds too good to be true to me.

--But now, I don't have to sew by hand.  One of my other Quilt Camp buddies brought me a sewing machine to have, and it's a good little machine made by Bernina.  No, it's not the high end version.  It's their budget model--but it will even do button holes.  I did a bit of sewing with it, and it's a dream.

--I have a vision of starting to assemble quilt tops for Lutheran World Relief.  I have so much fabric, and I continue to collect more.  The machine will help with this process.

--My feet are also sore this morning.  We took more walks than we usually do.  Or maybe this daily walking at 3:00 will be the new normal at Quilt Camp, as more people realize it's an option and that it's good to get up and move around more than just going to the bathroom or the snack table.

--I can scarcely believe Quilt Camp is over.  There's always a moment before it starts where I savor the beginning, while also knowing how fast it will fly by.  And now, it has.  As always, what I cherish most is the chance to reconnect with friends.  

Quilt Camp Begins

I am glad I was able to be here yesterday to help with set up for Quilt Camp.  We don't have to do the heavy lifting work, the getting the 90 tables in place in the Faith Center at Lutheridge.  But we did need to do the other work:  deciding where the cutting tables and ironing boards will be, putting plastic tablecloths on the tables in the worst condition, going out to get more plastic tablecloths, running extension cords from plugs to tables, and those kinds of things.

We also had to do the work that seems trivial but takes time:  putting nametags into plastic holders, putting those plastic holders on the table so that retreat members could find them easily, lots and lots of organizing of supplies.

By the time that everyone arrived and settled in, I was tired.  But it was a pleasant tired, a far cry from the tired that I feel after driving in from a distance for a retreat.  I got some sewing done, and today I hope to make serious progress on my big project:  a new quilt top for the quilt that we sleep under.  The quilt top is created.  I'll attach it to the old quilt and put on a new binding.  The quilt back is still in good shape.

It may seem like a strange approach, adding a new quilt top to an old quilt.  But in fact, it's a very old approach:  quilters in past centuries didn't have access to supplies that we do, so they used old quilts as the layer of batting in new quilts.

I also plan to make progress on my other big project, the log cabin quilt, the one I thought I might be able to finish back in March.  But when I stretched it on the bed, I realized I needed a few more rows.  I've been making log cabin patches, so we shall see.

We're having glorious weather, which is a gift.  I am leading a walk each day at 3, and if the weather this week was the rainy, cold weather of last week, we'd ditch those plans.  At Quilt Camp, we spend much of the day and night in a chair, and I spend it hunched over, which is my posture any time I'm in a chair. 

I am surprised to realize I took no pictures yesterday.   Happily there is still time.

Gratitudes Before the Start of Quilt Camp

Quilt Camp starts today.  This time, unlike last Quilt Camps, I'm part of the leadership team.  I will help with set up today, I will deliver the very short sermon for Saturday closing worship, and beyond that, I'm not sure what being on the Quilt Camp leadership team means.

In the early days of summer, when I thought about Fall Quilt Camp, I thought I would head to Spartanburg today, do my teacher duties, and then arrive for Quilt Camp.  But as the semester has gone on, I've changed my mind.  My students can use today to get caught up, and I'd like to be a bit less tired when Quilt Camp starts.

I am so grateful to be working at a place where I have this kind of flexibility.  I am so grateful to be at a place where when I say, "I'll be leading a quilt retreat this week," and no one says, "What does that have to do with you as a teacher?  No, you can't be off campus this week."  I'm thinking of past bosses who made their disapproval known, even as I was using my personal vacation time to be away.

Make no mistake:  I do get teaching inspiration from retreats.  It may be a different kind of inspiration than I would get at a literary conference, but I am a different teacher, a better teacher, because I go on these retreats.

I am also grateful that I live closer to camp.  When I first heard about Quilt Camp at Lutheridge, back in 2018 or 2019, I lived in South Florida, a twelve hour drive if all the traffic went smoothly.   I was torn--on the one hand, it was a longer retreat, so the drive would be worth it; in those days, I never would have made the drive for a retreat that started Friday night and ended Sunday morning, as so many retreats did then.  But on the other hand, it was such a long drive.

Because I live here now, I have the best of several worlds.  I don't have a long drive.  I get to sleep in my own bed.  I don't feel like I'm abandoning my spouse or my other duties at home.  Of course, that benefit has a shadow side--it's also hard for me to completely disconnect on retreat.  But that was true of past retreats too.  My brain is always working at various levels, and it's hard for me to focus on just one.

This morning I realized another value to coming to Quilt Camp from my house that's less than a mile away.  I feel less pull to do the other area attractions:  apple orchards, fabric stores, and Appalachian arts and crafts.  At least my active brain will calm down around the other wonderful outings that I would want to be taking, if I didn't already live here.

On this morning of the day when Quilt Camp begins, I am most grateful to be feeling like my life is in better alignment than it was back in 2018/2019 when I thought about the possibility of coming to Quilt Camp and decided I couldn't make it work.

Rejections to Treasure

I got a rejection note in my inbox, and it spurred me to look up my submission.  Sure enough, the rejection note referred to two of the poems in a specific way (the full fat cream and the cinnamon rolls):

"Thank you very much for entrusting us with your poetry. I’m sorry to say that you’re not a finalist for this year’s ______ Prize, but I'm always glad to read your work! As far as I'm concerned, you deserve all the full fat cream, all the cinnamon rolls."

I promptly made a few more submissions, with those poems, to other places.  It put me in mind of a time long ago, when I was a much younger poet, taking rejected poems out of the envelope of rejection, giving them a quick check to make sure that they weren't marked in any way, and putting them directly into a new envelope going to a different literary journal, along with another self-addressed, stamped envelope.

For many years now, I've been avoiding any literary journal that charges $3.00 or more for a submission.  I was still back in the paper era, thinking about how little I used to spend when I sent out submissions in envelopes through the U.S. Mail.  But postage has gone up, so now $3.00 seems somewhat reasonable, at least once a year.

I'm still aghast at the odds against my success.  I still want to be a bit wary, and I don't want to lose track of my expenses, which are no longer tax deductible for me, since it's been years since I earned any money from writing.

There is part of me that wonders why I bother.  Publications aren't likely to get me a tenure track job or other opportunities.  My annual review at Spartanburg Methodist College does consider publications, but they are far from the most important part of how I will be evaluated.

I have been dreaming of a book with a spine for so many years and decades now that I still hope it happens.  So part of my submission strategy is force of habit.

I still get a thrill when I have an acceptance.  That alone makes it worth the submitting.  I also know that other work has to take priority, the teaching and the sermon writing, the work that actually pays me money.