Summer Then, Summer Now

A year ago I'd be getting ready to head over to the VA hospital for my first day of CPE, Clinical Pastoral Education.  I blogged about it during my first week, then it was brought up in a group meeting that I was blogging my positive observations, that VA officials higher up the chain were monitoring.  I was writing on my own computer, during my off hours, so I decided to be even more careful.  I didn't use the VA computers for anything other than entering patient notes and checking VA e-mail.

So, for future scholars, reading last summer's blog posts, wondering why I wasn't writing more, there's the story.  I did some offline journaling during the summer, but for the most part, I was too exhausted by being a VA Hospital chaplain to do too much in the way of writing at all.

I'm still not sure why this kind of training is seen as essential for ordination in the ELCA version of the Lutheran church.  Chaplaincy is VERY different from visiting parishioners in the hospital.  Throughout last summer, I kept thinking, what, exactly, am I supposed to be learning here?

While I liked all of the people I met during my CPE experience, I have not kept in touch with any of them.  It's strange, in a way--we do have a lot in common, even outside of our shared CPE summer.  But I am old enough now that I can't keep in touch with friends in the deep way I would like--there's just too many people to call every week or to see once a month.  So I'm rarely adding more.

CPE made for a strange summer, and it came crashing to an unexpected close when my mom got very sick with pneumonia; she was much closer to dying than we knew at the time.

This summer is very different, and I'm grateful.  I'm teaching more online classes, so I'm not having a complete summer off.  We've got a house that needs attention, 2 houses really.  But even with the pivots and plotting that a fixer-upper requires, there's still more down time.  I don't need to be at a hospital for 9 hours a day.  I have time for other interests, time to see friends, for example.  I'm still feeling overwhelmed at times, but I'd rather be overwhelmed by home repair timelines than by patients with life threatening issues.

The Morning After the Tony Awards

I have just spent a delightful smidge of time reading about the Tony awards.  Once I wouldn't have had to read newspaper accounts; once, in long ago teenage years, I would have stayed up late to watch the awards show.

I don't remember a time when I wasn't interested in drama as a genre (as opposed to drama as a lifestyle?).  I was in plays throughout elementary school, and I was that strange kid that also wrote plays--and performed them.  I loved making puppets and putting on puppet shows.  For Christmas one year, I got a puppet theatre, which was three boards with hinges and a square opening--and a curtain!

So perhaps it seems inevitable that at some point, I'd think about becoming an actress as a career plan.  I first decided this in 7th grade, and in 9th grade, my best friend and I planned to go to NYC as roommates when we graduated from college.  She had recently moved from New Jersey to Charlottesville, Virginia, and was homesick.  I had recently moved and was impatient for grown up life to start.

I read every play I could get my hands on (often out loud, in my room, choosing one character and reading only those parts out loud) and bought the soundtracks to Tony nominated musicals.  Occasionally, I went to see plays--during most of my childhood, we lived in places with community theatre or university drama department offerings.  In those days, seeing Broadway traveling shows meant a trip to larger cities like Atlanta or Washington D.C., which we did occasionally.

This year, unlike other years, I read about last night's Tony awards, and most of the names of the plays are familiar to me.  In part, it's because many of the nominees are revivals or shows based on earlier works, some dramas or musicals (like Cats), some not (like The Lost Boys, based on the movie from 1987).  I also worry that we're in a thin period for theatre, where fewer shows make it to the stage or stay there long, so it means that people like me have less to keep track of from a distance, if we try to keep track through the years.

I am happy that I didn't try to make my childhood love into a grown up career--Broadway has not been kind to women, particularly older women.  I am happy that this childhood love of drama continues to make me happy, even as I don't always go to see live theatre or even read plays.  I do want to make a mid-year intention to read more plays, beginning with Bess Wohl, who won last night for Liberation.

Short Story Inspirations and "Mrs. Dalloway"

On Friday, I headed to Columbia to see my grad school friend who had a catastrophic stroke 2 years ago and now lives in a skilled nursing unit.  After that visit, I went to a different grad school friend, my upstairs neighbor in long-ago grad school days.  We are both writers, both college English teachers, both on life paths similar and different.

Lately she's been attending a Shut Up and Write group, which has been working for her in all sorts of ways.  I keep thinking I might go with her on a Friday when her group meets.  I'm also thinking it might make an interesting experiment for my own writing classes that I teach.

As I've been driving these past few days, I had an idea for my idea that I had a year ago on the 100 year anniversary of the publication of Mrs. Dalloway.  I wrote about it in this blog post:  "Now I am thinking of new projects, 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."

Throughout the past year, this idea has bubbled back up periodically and then simmered right back down.  I have not had the time or focus to write a novel.

And then, on Friday, I thought, why not write linked short stories?  Write a short story for each year of my past 30 years and then choose the best.  I would probably not play with time; I would probably organize the stories chronologically.  So the fact that the characters in the blog post description are the same would not be a surprise.

I immediately felt tired at the amount of short stories if I had to write one per year--so I immediately decided that I didn't have to do each year.  I did wonder about perspective--if I'm writing a story set in 1995, can I use knowledge that doesn't come for another 20 years?

On my drive yesterday, I thought about a different approach.  I could write stories by way of subject.  I wrote one such story as a requirement for a seminary class, which I wrote about at the end of this blog post.  That story used fairy tales as a jumping off point to talk about beauty and self image and other stories, like the Little House books, that girls often read, along with boiling water in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene.  

Some subjects I thought about:

--shoes:  hiking boots and camouflage high tops

--the habit of buying fixer-uppers

--tea practices

--various books could serve as jumping off points, the ones we read in grad school or in childhood and the surprising intersections

--journaling and blogging and the types of writing that aren't always valued by grad school professors

--the oat bran muffins I made in grad school, the muffins sold in the coffee shop in the basement of the humanities office building

--all sorts of baking

--nutrition developments through the years

--a wide variety of religious/theological issues

--and then there's all the music

--yearning for graduate studies even after getting a PhD

I love the idea of short stories instead of a work that has a long narrative arc across 200-300 pages. It's an idea that's much more manageable with my current commitments.  Maybe in retirement I'll return to to writing traditional novels. 

Annual Dinner with Camp Counselors

Last night, we had dinner with the Lutheridge and Lutherock camp counselors.  We've done it before, and I always come away impressed.  The neighborhood community who lives in the residential section of Lutheridge brings a variety of desserts, and the camp provides burgers and hot dogs, chips and beverages.

We sat with a guy who's finishing the fall semester and then headed to Duke Divinity school and another senior staffer who hopes to come back for another summer or two before he said he probably should find a regular job.  I said, "Or you could continue working in outdoor ministries year round."

Happily, no one was there to point out the shrinking job opportunities in that field.  I will never understand why the larger church doesn't do more to help/commit to campus and outdoor ministries.  The counselors I spoke to last night are full of hope for all the ways their futures might unfold.  I've found that my SMC students are similarly optimistic.  It's refreshing.

Before the dinner, I spent the day trying to fix my course shell for my online class at Spartanburg Methodist College.  The book has changed editions (again--sigh), so the references to the book page numbers that students find in the assignments and discussion posts are wrong.  Ugh.  I'm teaching someone else's course, and so it's not intuitive to me, the way I would have if I had created it all--it takes more time to diagnose problems and fix them.

I also did some baking--I decided to bring a gluten free, dairy free dessert.  It worked beautifully.  It's an almond-coconut concoction, and I want to record it here:

1 C. sugar

3 eggs

1 1/2 C. almond flour (or grind up a lot of almonds into as fine a powder as possible)

1 1/2 C. coconut (I used sweetened and unsweetened in 2 different experiments--no difference)

Whip the sugar and eggs until tripled in volume or until tired of the noise of the mixer.  Fold in the almond flour and the coconut.  Pour in a 9 inch cake pan lined with parchment paper and greased or in cupcake pan.  Bake at 350 for 25ish minutes.  You can only tell if it's done by color--a golden, light brown color.  It will be sticky and delicious.  It keeps at room temperature for days, although the crispiness of the crust declines.

The Tiredness of Being Grounded

I woke up feeling tired--and why?  We spent much of yesterday at our Spartanburg fixer-upper, but we weren't doing the hard-on-the-body work of home remodel.  We were there for experts to come and evaluate various systems.

Yes, most people do this before buying a property, but we had a sense of what would be needed without needing a home inspector to tell us.  Now it's time to figure out a timeline.  So yesterday we had a plumbing team and an HVAC guy and an electrician come to the house.  It was a lot of waiting.

This morning, I thought, yes, it's been a long time since I had to be in a physical location for 9 hours.  The visits between experts were spaced out, which was great, since we could give our individual attention to each system under analysis.  It was exhausting in the unique way that waiting for home repair specialists is exhausting.

Before I went to bed, I took some ibuprofen.  Why were my arthritic feet so achy?  I have no idea, but they were.  They are not as achy today.

Now it is time to get on with the tasks of each week which don't involve a fixer-upper:  sermon writing, online teacher tasks, food prep.  Let me get my walk in before inertia takes over.

Memory Whisps from Last Week's Travel to the High Country of NC

Before we get too far away from our travels of last week, let me record some memories that I don't want to slip away.  We went to a different part of the North Carolina mountains, near Boone.  We were there for the wedding of my spouse's sister's oldest child.  The wedding was beautiful, of course, but there were other beautiful moments:

--On Monday night, we went to Parallel Brewing in Boone for a rehearsal dinner/party.  Do they brew beer?  I don't know.  Did I taste it?  No.  I wanted wine to go with the pizza.  Was any of the wine memorable enough to make note of what it was?  No.

--I was much more interested in Huzzah Books, which shares the building with Parallel Brewing.  We could go back and forth, which made the party better--more space.

--I also loved lingering among the books, which seemed to be used books from decades when publishers were more serious about publishing.  I found a book of "best new poetry" published in 1960 or so.  The names were fairly familiar and all male, except for Adrienne Rich.

--One of our younger family members (21 or so) was thrilled to find a book by Jane Kenyon.  I was thrilled that she was thrilled.

--We didn't do more in Boone.  We spent most of our time visiting with family members on the front porches of our cabins.  If it had been clearer weather, we'd have had a glorious view.

--I did love seeing the fog/mist move across the land, only to vanish.  Once again, I thought about how humans might come to believe in ghosts.

--I was disappointed that we didn't have a clear view of the night sky.  I wanted that non-light polluted view.  But we did have lovely nights on the porch, watching the mist, listening to frogs and insects.  And we saw fireflies, which I associate with much later in the summer.

--I'm not usually awake much past 8:30 or 9 these days, but for two evenings last week, I had normal-ish adult bedtimes.

--It was great to have a get away that was much closer.  We were home after a 2.5 hour drive.

Songs and Other American Experiments

It's Tuesday, and I began as I almost always do on a Tuesday, reading Dave Bonta's Poetry Blog Digest, which almost always takes me in interesting directions.  This morning, it's been a bit of a trip down memory lane, courtesy of Shawna LeMay's blog post which mentioned Bruce Springsteen's "Downbound Train."

She quoted lyrics, which I didn't remember from the song:

"Now I work down at the car wash
Where all it ever does is rain
Don't you feel like you're a rider
On a downbound train?"

So of course, I went in search of the song, which instantly catapulted me back to the fall of 1984, when the album Born in the USA came out.  I bought it at Wal-Mart, along with a fan for my dorm room.  A few weeks later, my boyfriend went back to Memphis where his mom needed him.  He'd been wearing my DC101 (a rock radio station) jacket that my sister had won somehow and given to me.  That jacket smelled of sweat and the Players cigarettes that he smoked, and I wore it all fall, feeling sad as my smells replaced his.

It was a different time, the results of a different election, daylight in America, brutal regimes across the globe, and when people wonder why I'm not as hopeless in 2026 as I might be, it's because I remember past time when I couldn't imagine how humanity would survive--and here we are, surviving this history that is not repeating but rhyming, a slant rhyme, to be sure, or maybe just a history so full of allusions that it's hard to read.

I wrote so many letters in the fall of 1984, actual letters on paper, back when long distance phone calls were expensive, and the only phone I had was the one at the end of my dorm hallway, where those of us with long distance relationships talked to distant loves.  My half of the correspondence filled a dresser drawer.  My boyfriend's letters took up a shoe box.

I married him anyway.  And now, here we are, decades later.  On Sunday we watched some PBS presentation on the American experiment, featuring Ken Burns talking about his documentaries.  It was fairly recent with the focus on the Revolution in 1776, and my spouse bleakly said, "It's all over."  I think he meant the grand experiment of freedom, and I said, "No, it's not."  I was talking about the American experiment of revolution and self-governance, with piercing awareness of all the ways that the foundational documents of the USA have not borne fruit--and all the ways they have.

We were well into the second bottle of wine on Sunday, so we didn't discuss further.  But it's a conversation we've been having since 1983 when we first met, so we didn't really need words.

This morning, some lines came to me, as I've been reading and writing:

We are half drunk with disappointment,
fueled by sundrenched picnics and longing,
and you declare the great experiment
dead, and I say no.

Schooled on Springsteen
and Woody Guthrie,
and the songs of enslaved people,
I know that times have always been hard.

I've begun the poem, but I don't know where it leads--like so many elements in my life.  The YouTube algorithm has given me delightful songs from the Springsteen starting point.  It's been a delightful morning, as Tuesdays so often are, rooted in the words (and rabbit holes) of others.

The Feast Day of the Visitation and the Reminder that So Much More Is Possible

Today is the Feast Day of the Visitation, the feast day that celebrates Mary, pregnant with Jesus, going to be with Elizabeth, pregnant with John the Baptist.  We could celebrate this feast day in any number of ways:  we could celebrate intergenerational support for each other, the ways that God doesn't abandon women who are on the margins of society, the ways that improbable situations can be harnessed for hope, and the hospitality that is evident on so many levels (the wombs of the women, Elizabeth welcoming Mary).

The story in Luke leaves questions, of course.  Did Mary travel alone?  How did she stay safe?  What did Mary and Elizabeth talk about in the month (months?) that she was there?  Why did she leave before Elizabeth gave birth?  What did Joseph think about all of this?  Was Joseph even part of this narrative?

We get more of Joseph's perspective in the gospel of Matthew.  What I love about this feast day, however, is that it's focused on the women.  We don't have much celebration of women in the Christian tradition.  We should hold on to what's here, in addition to looking for ways to add more women to our celebrations.

I love this story because it reminds us that God doesn't choose those who are already ready and waiting for the call.  Imagine how many lives could have been changed if the earliest Church had emphasized this aspect of a call, this being worthy in God’s eyes even if one is not worthy in the world’s eyes. Imagine if we had centuries of the message that God loves us before we’ve done anything special at all, and even if we never live into our full potential in the eye’s of our society, God will see our value. 

Imagine if the church had given emphasis to Elizabeth, along with Mary.  I love the message that we're not too old, that our hopes and dreams might be answered after all.  We're not cast away if we're not a young woman, like Mary, with years ahead of her to be of service to God.  The definition of fertility enlarges.  

On Sunday, we heard that God doesn't call the equipped, but God equips those that God calls.  There's a bit of troubling theology here.  I believe we're all called, over and over again, a wide variety of calls.  God offers us invitations, and even if we say no, God will return with more invitations.  And when we say yes, God has resources, even if we don't.  We might even discover that we have all that we need.  God may not need to equip us at all.  Our weaknesses might turn out to be strengths.

It's a great day to celebrate those possibilities.  And even if we've been feeling like our time is passed, that it's too late for us, it's great to remember that God doesn't see us that way.  If we feel like we're too inexperienced, that we don't know what we're doing, it's great to remember that God doesn't see us that way.

It's great to remember Elizabeth's blessing:  "Blessed is she who has believed that the Lord would fulfill the Lord's promises to her!” (Luke 1:  45, NIV, gendered language corrected).  Elizabeth gave Mary this blessing, but I believe it extends to us all, if we're open to the idea that with God and community, so much more can be possible than if we rely on our solitary selves.

Unfinished Post in a Scrambled Week

It's been a scrambled week.  Yesterday I kept reminding myself, "It's Friday, not earlier in the week."  Leaving town for a wedding made Wednesday feel like Sunday; the wedding was on Tuesday because it's cheaper to have a wedding at a scenic venue on a weekday than on a Saturday.  But to my brain, it was a Saturday.

Yesterday we had loose plans to go back to the new fixer-upper house in Spartanburg.

Update, 11 a.m.:  My week is so scrambled that I never finished this post.

Our Next Fixer-Upper

If such a thing exists as a regular reader of this blog, that reader would notice that my regular schedule of posting has been disrupted.  On Monday, we left town until Wednesday for a wedding.  Yesterday we headed down to Spartanburg because I scheduled a turn-on date for water and electric utilities at our new-to-us fixer upper-house in Spartanburg.

Yes, we bought another fixer-upper when we're not done fixing up the house we have at Lutheridge.  Let me be clear--we're not selling that house.  We are fortunate enough to be able to afford 2 small houses.  And one reason why we can is that each house needed work, and very few homebuyers these days want to put in that sweat equity.

In the spirit of full disclosure and complete honesty, I, too, would like a house where I didn't need to think about upgrades, where someone else had already made the decisions and installations.  But as we looked at houses, we kept saying, "Why would someone make the kitchen this way?  Why didn't they do the bathroom that way?"

I almost didn't look at the house we bought.  The pictures were just too scary, like this one of the kitchen:

Did they have a fire?  Some catastrophic plumbing issue?  But it was around the corner from a very cute house, so I swung by.  As I peered in the window, I thought, well this isn't as scary as it looks.

When we had our realtor show it to us, we all said, "This house is much better than it looks.  And more solid than it looks."  So we made an offer which was accepted.  We closed on the house May 8 and because of travel plans made a year ago, we are only now having time to make upgrades.

You might say, "Yes, but why 2 houses?"  In March, I accepted an offer of a tenure track Associate Professor position from Spartanburg Methodist College, which means more job stability--income to count on and a schedule to count on, a schedule which means I need to be on campus every weekday, during the 8 months of the year that school is in session.  I have done that kind of commuting for the past 2 years, and it's getting tiring.

I'm still a Synod Appointed Minister at Faith Lutheran in Bristol, so our thinking is that we'll be at the Lutheridge house on the week-end, in the Spartanburg house during the weekdays.  And I will want to spend the summer months in the Lutheridge house.

Of course, much could change, as much has changed.  It hasn't been that long since we bought our current fixer-upper, the Lutheridge house.  It was just 4 years ago, when I had only done a year of seminary, when I didn't even know that SMC existed.

Second Spring Wedding

I will write more about our second spring wedding adventure at a later time.  Back in March, at the first spring wedding adventure, I wrote a blog post that covers some of the territory of this week's wedding too:  "My spouse's sister's youngest child is getting married this week-end, and her older child will get married in May. I think that this wedding will be the first of the next generation that I've attended. Wait, that's not true. I went to the weddings of both children of my grad school friends who moved to England, in part because she was from there, in part because medical care was better/easier there. But I am almost sure this is the first wedding of grown ups whom I held when they were babies."

This time, it was the oldest child getting married.  I remember the morning of her birth, getting the phone call in my grad school apartment from my father-in-law, who was also at this wedding which happened last night.

This time, wedding travel took us to the high mountain country near Boone, NC--spectacular scenery, very rainy weather, fog rolling in, winding dirt/mud roads.

I am sitting in a tiny cabin in near dark, and I'm always surprised at how hard it is for me to work on the computer lit only by the light of the computer.  I'm fine reading online stuff with no other light, but writing a blog post feels hard.  Or maybe it's the tiredness that makes it hard, the existing outside of my normal routines. 

Let me record a line that came to me this morning, which may find its way into a poem at some point:  "I am the bartender without a corkscrew."

Memorial Day 2026

Today is Memorial Day, and through the years, I've come to realize how many different things this holiday can mean to people.  I've met people who won't celebrate it because of its roots in memorializing the Civil War Union dead.  My dad was an Air Force officer in the Reserves until he retired, so Memorial Day was personal for him.  I don't think I know anyone who was killed while on active duty, but I do want to honor those who died.  Some people I've known seem to have no inkling that the holiday has anything to do with soldiers at all--for them, it's about getting a good deal on a holiday sale or opening up the vacation home or having a cook out.

I remember feeling desperate for Memorial Day, for a day off, but during my days of working as an administrator, I was always desperate for a day off, a day off that didn't require me to use up any of my paltry allotment of vacation time.  For the past several years, Memorial Day as a three day week-end was not top of my mind, since I've already had a few weeks of schedule easing in May.

I also know that many people don't get to have time off.  All of our grocery stores are open today, for example.  When I taught in community colleges in South Carolina, we didn't have Memorial Day off.  Our nursing students needed every scrap of time in the summer, so that holiday had to be sacrificed so that we stayed in compliance.  Or maybe it was because of the Civil War; I got different explanations. In past years, I've used the day off to catch up on grading for my online classes, and this year, I'll do some grading too.  Most days of the year, I have grading to do.

This year, I'm thinking about past years, when war seemed far away.  And now, here we are, with war in Europe (Ukraine) and war with Iran, and lots of smaller scale wars across the globe.

But let me circle back to the intent of this holiday.  On this day which has become for so many of us just an excuse to have a barbecue, let us pause to reflect and remember. If we're safe right now, let us say a prayer of gratitude. Let us remember that we've still got lots of military people serving in dangerous places.

Let us remember how often the world zooms into war. Let us pray to be preserved from those horrors.

Here's a prayer I wrote for Memorial Day:

God of comfort, on this Memorial Day, we remember those souls whom we have lost to war. We pray for those who mourn. We pray for military members who have died and been forgotten. We pray for all those sites where human blood has soaked the soil. God of Peace, on this Memorial Day, please renew in us the determination to be peacemakers. On this Memorial Day, we offer a prayer of hope that military people across the world will find themselves with no warmaking jobs to do. We offer our pleading prayers that you would plant in our leaders the seeds that will sprout into saplings of peace.

(Pictures in this post are memorials around D.C. from the Honor Flight experience that I was part of in October of 2022)

Rain and Writing

It's the kind of rainy morning that's saying, "Wait and walk later."  Of course, the risk in waiting is that I might not go at all:  it could continue to rain or I could submit to laziness.  It's the kind of rainy morning where I have writing that I need to do, so waiting to walk makes sense.  

I was feeling bad that I had no sermon rough draft written, but by last night I was glad.  We went to the last fish fry of the season at Faith Lutheran in Bristol, TN, where we discovered that a church member had made aprons for everyone, reversible at that.  As I looked at us all wearing our aprons, I thought about Pentecost and the metaphors for the Holy Spirit, and I got an idea that hadn't been there before.  I don't want to write about it further, for fear of losing the energy of the idea.  Once I've posted the sermon, I'll come back and put the links in this post. 

I am happy for the rain, even if it means my walk never happens.  We've been in such a deep drought across the southeast.

Of course, last night I was not happy for the rain as we drove back from the fish fry.  At first, as we left at 7:30, it was beautiful, with clouds across the mountain.  The rain settled in as we got to the top of the mountain; once we got to the road construction outside of Asheville, the rain got heavier and the road conditions worse with construction debris and barriers and various lines on the road.  I have rarely been more relieved when we pulled into our driveway as I was last night.

Let me keep this blog post short so that I can take advantage of this rainy morning and get my Pentecost sermon written.

Great (but Easy) Books to End a Reading Slump

When I read/hear a book review/author interview, if the book sounds good, I put a request in at the local library--the same goes for social media.  But often, it takes many months before I actually read the book, which means I often don't remember where I heard about the book.  In some ways, it doesn't matter, but I'm often curious, particularly if the book disappoints.

I'm happy to report that my 3 latest reads have not disappointed.  I am always overjoyed when I get books that are the kind of reading experiences where I get lost in the book and/or when I wake up thinking about the book.

*  Still Life by Sarah Winman was not that kind of book.  It was more gently compelling, a perfect just before bed kind of read, when I can only read a page or two, every evening or so.  It was a book about two characters who meet in Tuscany as WWII is coming to an end and the ways their lives revolve around Tuscany and each other.  It was a delight of a read, not the 800 page sprawling history, but encompassing post-WWII 20th century history nonetheless.  It showed humans at their best, and occasionally (enough to make the book compelling) not at their best.  What made it gentle is that the characters were able to recover from bad behavior.  It's the kind of book that bubbles up in my brain occasionally, and in a good way.

-- Nonesuch by Francis Spufford was also rooted in World War II, but it was a different approach, with time traveling and wizardry of a sort.  I loved the main character, a woman both of her time and ahead of her time, lots of interesting insights about gender and relationships and finance.  I had trouble visualizing the way the time travel happened, by way of statues and shapes shifting, so I scanned the pages and pages of description, and had a reading experience that came out just fine.  It was a fun but also serious read about fights against fascists, both the historically accurate kind (Britain during the bombings of London) and the time travelling, fantastical kind.

*  The Wedding People by Alison Espach was a different kind of delight, revolving around the ways we try to redeem our lives through our relationships.  At first, I almost took it back to the library, because I didn't want to read about very expensive weddings and the entitled people who want them.  But the book was in high demand, even though it was published in 2022, so I decided to read the first chapter--and I was hooked.  The main character is an adjunct English faculty member, so there's some delightful stuff about reading and teaching, along with lots of humor--and a happy ending!

# Next up is Colored Television by Danzy Senna.  How delightful to have a bit of time to return to reading, one of my earliest loves. 

* I put these books on my list after reading Paisley Rekdal's March 18 Facebook post:  "OK people, I'm getting ready for a little R&R time and I'm looking for a fun book that will tax no more than 5 brain cells. Like, writing that will basically bathe my frontal lobe in martinis and oxytocin and chocolate for a day or two then evaporate. A one-night stand of a book. A dumb but hot college boyfriend of a book. What is that book? I swear, I will go back to serious literature and yelling at my congresspeople and more paperwork in a week, but right now I just need a recommendation for a fun, IQ-obliterating read. No judgement. What is that book for you?"  These two books were so delightful and satisfying that I returned to her post this morning to capture some additional recommendations.

-- This book came to me by way of a Fresh Air interview with the author.

#  This book came by way of Leslie Pietrzyk's May 16 Facebook post of 4 books that she had recently read: "Earlier in the year I was in a patch of so-so books, and I'm delighted to report that these excellent beauties got me out of my slump! Highly recommend, and 3 are writer-adjacent!"   Her post reminded me that I heard good things about Colored Television when it first came out, so I requested it from the library, where it arrived in record time.

Creative Upkeep: Sorting the Strips, Filling the Markers

Yesterday was a day of creative sorting, creative upkeep.  Late morning, I returned home from a bagel break with a retreat friend who is here working a temporary gig at Lutheridge--what a delight to remember how many friends I have in the wide, wide world.  I decided it was time to return to my Christmas quilt that I want to have ready to gift at Thanksgiving.

Of course, it's been awhile since I picked up this project, so I had to remember what plan I had back in March when I cut strips and put them away.  Happily, I had put all the strips in a separate bag inside the bag of Christmas cloth, so I laid out the strips by color and leapt back in.  Later, I laid out the patches on the bed to see how far I am from finishing.  My plan is to sew the top together at the August Quilt Camp and finish assembling it at the November quilt camp.

In the afternoon I read a bit outside, as I did on Monday--trying to keep my sunkissed look from last week going.  It's been awhile since I spent time on the deck, and I've missed it.  I used to do the refilling of my markers on the deck--at first because we didn't have another table, and then, because it was messy and I wanted the mess to stay outside.  I decided to refill my markers yesterday.

It's a task that I don't particularly like--I would rather buy a new marker than refill the old one, wasteful as that is.  But I've already bought a lot of ink to refill markers, so I try to make myself refill the markers occasionally.  It's sort of meditative (when the ink goes where it should), sort of irritating (when the ink spurts or overflows).

In the evening, I did some stitching and did some sketching, along with some reading.  I felt a bit irritable because it's a week that's unusually hot for the mountains in North Carolina, and I'm trying hard not to turn the AC on too early in the afternoon/evening.  My spouse hates the cold weather months, and I want him to have some heat while it's here (while at the same time wishing he would just go outside and be in the heat out there).  

We finally turned on the AC when the inside temp hit 80 degrees.  Shortly after that, I went to bed where I slept the satisfied sleep of one who is getting her creative life back on track.

Summer Writing Intentions

I have not meant to let so much time go by since my last blog post; indeed, I'm astonished to see that I haven't written since Friday.  On Saturday, I wrote a rough draft of my sermon, and Sunday, I had to be on the road by 7 a.m. to preach and preside at Faith Lutheran in Bristol.  Yesterday I was putting together the syllabus and other unique-to-me course elements for the online Professional Writing class that I'm teaching for Spartanburg Methodist College this summer.  The class starts on Tuesday, a week from today, but students have access on Thursday.

I often tell people that the only time I really feel that I have off is the week between Christmas and January 1:  no classes to teach, no sermon to write, no prep work to do.  Still, this week feels different, even though I still have appointments and online teaching duties.

It feels like the first week of summer, although it's hard for me to pin down when summer starts precisely.  The last day of in-person class feels like a demarcation line, as does turning in grades, as does graduation.  I want to spend some time this week planning for ways to get back to creative writing, the non-seminary, non-sermon writing.  I want more poetry.  I also want to remember that this summer is the time I planned to put a new poetry collection together.

Here's what I wrote in a December blog post:  " 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."  That blog post reminded me that I had looked at past manuscripts--do I want to use one of them as a skeleton/scaffolding or start by looking at files of individual poems?

I also want to return to my New Year's resolution, which was also my 2025 resolution:   "I am not feeling OK about how many poems I am not writing. I do a good job of writing down fragments and inspirations, but I'm also aware that I have fewer inspirations and fragments in the past year or two than has been usual. I want to end the year with 52 poems written, finished poems. They may not be worth sending out, but they need to be finished. Fifty-two poems gives me space to catch up, and space to have a white hot streak that sets me ahead."

Here's hoping for some white hot writing streaks this summer!

Notes from an Off-season Beach

We are at the beach in a slightly off season, here in mid-May.  It's warm enough to work up a summer-like sweat in the late afternoon.  But my morning walk today had a chilly enough wind that it was almost unpleasant.  Let me record a few other observations.

--Being here in mid-May means that the only children who are here are younger than elementary school age, which translates into lots of cute toddlers.

--We are also here with lots of older people, the ones with either very flexible vacation times or retired people.

--I am likely in the same age category as many of these older women, yet I am working from a different jewelry sensibility:  a nice way of saying that I love colorful glass beads that aren't very valuable, and I'm surrounded by precious gems and metals that are.  I am not wearing jewelry on vacation, and I'm in the minority.

--I have started judging restaurants by their playlists.  High marks go to Poseidon for having 3 Queen songs, including the more obscure "Hammer to Fall," which I am listening to in my earbuds right now.  What a great song--and it still feels very relevant.

--I do realize that "Hammer to Fall" was released as a single and went up the charts.  When I say it's more obscure, I mean that it no longer gets much airplay.  We're much more likely to hear "Somebody to Love," when we're out and about.

--A different musician performs by the pool each day.  Yesterday the musician could play steel pan drums, guitar, and saxaphone, but he didn't always know the song lyrics.  Strange to hear his version of Sting's "Englishman in New York," which didn't sound very English-y, and we're far, far away from both England and New York.

--Yesterday was my last Lutheran Confessions class.  It was a good class, and I learned a lot, although I'm not sure that much of it will be useful in my future life.  I love the idea that the creeds are not like a pledge of allegiance, but more like a love song of the early Church, more like a hymn than a confession of faith.  It seems counterintuitive--we say we confess our faith using the words of the _____Creed.

--It's been a good week, both bittersweet and tiring and inspiring.

A Poem for Ascension Day

Today is Ascension Day, the day that 40 days after Easter, 10 days before Pentecost. This feast day commemorates Jesus being taken up into Heaven.

Imagine it from the eyes of those who have followed Christ from traipsing around Galilee, Crucifixion, and then Resurrection. You have just gotten your beloved Messiah returned to you, and then, poof, he's gone again. What a whipsawed feeling they must have had.

For more on this day from a theological view, head over to this post on my theology blog.

A few years ago, May Day, Ascension Day, and performance review deadlines all converged, and I wrote a poem, "Conducting a Performance Review on the Feast of the Ascension."  It reminds me of how I am so grateful to have ascended out of administration.

Conducting a Performance Review on the Feast of the Ascension

I have wrestled
with these forms—a modern
crucifixion—for over forty
days. I spend more time
trying to coerce
the software into cooperation
than I do in assessment
of employee performance.

Regulations require me to assemble
the same information across several forms.
Employees must cobble
together thick packets of proof
that they’ve done what the forms
report, although if they hadn’t,
the work would have ground to a halt.

How I wish I could ascend
above all this bureaucracy,
that I could shower
my employees with all the glory
they deserve. I long to welcome
them with praise instead of forms.

Alas, the modern workplace
has yet to be redeemed,
and so, I slog
through forms and documentation and rubrics and scales
of pay. I protect my cowering, stressed
employees as best I can.
I whistle “Solidarity Forever” as I complete
the tasks that must be done.

Beach Sunrises

It's been a time of mostly vacation--and yet, I need to finish a paper for my Lutheran Confessions class that I'm taking and start thinking about Sunday's sermon.  It's been a time of mostly vacation, and yet, I still have 2 online classes that began at midnight.

It's nice to take a walk with different sunrise vistas:

Here's the Facebook post I wrote about the picture:  "This morning's Hilton Head sunrise is winder, sand scoured, with storm clouds rolling in. Only 5 of us on the beach to bear witness."

I thought that yesterday's sunrise would be like this morning's, but yesterday, we had a surprise break in the clouds.  At times, the sun looked like one of those pictures of a distant planet:

At one point yesterday morning, a sea turtle patrol truck drove down the beach away from the sunrise, with one young worker guy hanging out the window taking pictures.  I assume that the workers get to see a beach sunrise every morning.  The fact that one of them went to such an effort to get a picture made me happy.

I've said before, and I'll continue to remind myself that the human capacity for wonder makes me think that humans may survive after all.

On Mother's Day, Vacations, and Work

Here I sit on Mother's Day morning, one of the rare Sundays that I'm not getting ready to drive across the mountain to Bristol to preach and preside at Faith Lutheran.  Let me record some thoughts:

--I feel lucky to have a mom I love who loves me.  I know that many don't have that kind of luck.

--I feel lucky that my experiences of not having children is what I wanted, and it worked out how I envisioned.  I know that many don't have that kind of luck.

--I'm not preaching today because I'm in Hilton Head, SC with my mom and dad, who are in their last half of their 80's.  I know we don't have many more holidays like this ahead of us, so I'm glad to be able to be here.

--The last time I was in Hilton Head was in 2022, with my lower arm in a cast.  In fact, I had just had surgery to repair the broken wrist, so I was on heavy antibiotics, which messed up my GI system.  Happily, I'm not facing those kinds of challenges on this trip.

--The time before that, in 2021, we had stopped to pick up my sister at the Savannah/Hilton Head airport on our way north.  I remember one morning talking about whether or not we should sell our Florida house--the market was just starting to heat up.  She was one of the first who said, "Sell."  No equivocating, no hesitations. I had been accepted to seminary, but I still had my administration job, which was slated to end later in the year when the New York buyers of the school were going to close the Hollywood campus.

--We also came in September of 2020, where we were careful to stay very far apart from each other.  We grocery shopped early in the morning.  The resort amenities were very limited.

--I'm glad I was blogging during the pandemic.  Otherwise, I'd have lost a lot of those memories, or I would think back and doubt that it was really as bad as I was remembering.

--It's been a week of a different kind of disease news, hantavirus on a cruise ship.  I'm glad that I don't love going on a cruise ship.  In light of my understanding of disease and transmission, I have no desire to have a vacation that relies on a plane or a ship.

--It is the day after graduation which went well, but meant it was a day of a lot of driving.

--I came across this statistic in a New York Times article about retirement and work:  "Roughly 37 percent of Americans over 55 are in the work force."  That number seems low to me.  But what I really want is the percentage of working Americans who are ages 60-75.

--I feel lucky to be at a school where I can envision teaching long past the age where others might retire.  I won't be the only older faculty member--a lot of us know a good thing when we see it.

--And a lot of us have been teachers our whole lives, which means we can't afford to retire like past generations could.

Graduation Morning

I am up early, trying to write a rough draft of my last seminary paper for my Lutheran Confessions class, before heading down to Spartanburg for the graduation ceremony for Spartanburg Methodist College.  It will be the last time that both December and May graduates walk across the stage together.  Our number of graduates has gotten too large for our venue, and in the future, we'll have a December graduation and a May graduation, and faculty will decide which one they attend.

SMC's graduation had already outgrown the on-campus facilities, so we use a local high school.  And now, we're too big for that venue--what a wonderful problem to have, especially in this age of shrinking higher ed.

For a week where I didn't have regular classes to teach, I've been up and down I 26 more times than in a regular week:  faculty workshops and the faculty/staff lunch, a trip down to Columbia to see grad school friends, graduation, and a new housing adventure (I'll blog more about that later).  This morning, it's all feeling a bit surreal to me.

But I am also feeling fortunate.  Last year, I was happy that my year-to-year teaching contract had been renewed for another year.  This year, I am ecstatic that I have accepted a tenure track position at SMC.  I'm still not sure what it all means for ordination in the years ahead.  But I am delighted to be able to count on being employed by this school in a way that I hadn't before.

Julian of Norwich and Older Age

May 8 is the feast day of Julian of Norwich in the Anglican and the Lutheran church; in the Catholic church, it's May 13.  Is Julian of Norwich as famous now as Hildegard of Bingen or Ireland's St. Brigid?  Are any of these women more widely known now than they were in grad school when I first started searching for the females that had been left out of a variety of narratives?  I have no idea.  They are more widely known in the subcultures to which I belong, but in the wider world?

In those early days (the late 80's) of discovering female voices that had been left out of literature anthologies, I most treasured Julian of Norwich for her writing.  In later years, the theology of her writing fascinated me--so many centuries before any blooming of anything that could be called feminist, here was a woman writing about a feminine face of God.

Now, as I head into the second half of my life, Julian of Norwich calls to me in a different way.  For me, the last decade can be seen through a lens of loss:  my best friend from high school died a horrible cancer death, there have been other deaths along with a pandemic, we left South Florida for many reasons, job loss among them.  Why would Julian of Norwich speak to me in this new way?

I think of her, alone in her cell, all of her focus shrunk into so small a space.  I think of her as a model of living more with less.  So, I may never hike the Appalachian Trail in one long trek, but that doesn't mean that my life needs to come to a halt.  I may come to a point where I'm living in one room, but that might be a room that is more full than any of my previous homes.

When I've thought about my older age, I've assumed that I would create communities the same way I've always attempted.  I've thought about the Hildegards and the Brigids and their nunneries--I've always wanted (or thought I did) a community like that one.

Of course, having lived in smaller communities, I realize how much work goes into making that kind of community--but the rewards can be so amazing.

As my friends and family have had health crises, it has occurred to me that I may outlast my friends.  There may be no one to follow me to the commune.  What then?

I used to write to my friend with cancer:  "When we are little old ladies, rocking on the porch, we'll look back on this time . . ." and then I'd fill in with various visions.  When she died, I thought, well, I might be rocking on that porch all by myself.

Instead of that lonely vision, I'm going to train myself to think of Julian of Norwich.  Many of us may spend our later years not in some kind of community, but all alone, in our various houses and apartments.  While some isolation will occur, perhaps it can be a time of creativity, a time to focus that many of us won't have had before.

Mystics like Julian of Norwich can show us the way!

Faculty Appreciation

This morning, I'm sort of back to my normal school year schedule, as it has been for the last two years.  I will drive down to Spartanburg Methodist College, leaving here at 7ish, to make sure I'm on time for the morning's requirements.  We have a faculty meeting at 8:30 followed by a morning of faculty development workshops, followed by an appreciation lunch.

I don't resent today's tasks.  I remember a time when I resented quite bitterly being required to go back to campus during time when I wasn't teaching.  The administration viewpoint at the time was that we should be on campus 40 hours, except for our 4 weeks of vacation, 2 around Christmas and 2 in June.  We had a heavy quarterly teaching load:  6-6-5-5 when I started, 5 courses a quarter when the Art Institute of Ft. Lauderdale finally closed.  At times there was money for more traditional faculty development, like going to conferences.  But it was far more common for the school to save money by requiring us to do faculty development in house.

What really increased the bitterness of the faculty was that as the years progressed, the scrimping on costs got more severe, to the point where we didn't even have coffee, much less lunch or breakfast.  Today, in contrast, we have breakfast and lunch and we always have coffee available.

Let me stress that AiFL was a for-profit school, so those savings were going to the Corporate overlords who had bought the school in a hostile take-over.  I use the term hostile, because the Corporate overlords stripped all value from the school, leaving it a hollow shell.  When the first Corporate overlords bought the school, they kept a paycheck from all of us, telling us we'd get it back when we left.  My boss at the time assured me that if we'd gotten a job in a non-education sector, "in the real business world," we wouldn't see a paycheck for the first month we worked. Later, administrators lost a week of vacation time.  When I left the school, I didn't get that paycheck that had been kept.

I write these words, and I'm amazed we tolerated this treatment.  Of course, many of us had nowhere to go--the world is not awash in full-time faculty jobs, not then, not now.  And in some ways, the school was wonderful, full of creative people who were great colleagues.  In the early years when I was there, the students did go on to find great jobs, so the high cost of the school was worth it.  I was shocked when I discovered how much state schools really cost, so even the high tuition didn't seem as scandalous as the outer world might have seen it.

So believe me when I say, I am happy to be at a school that is committed to keeping costs for students low and committed to be growing at a sensible/conservative rate.  I am grateful to be at a school that truly appreciates faculty.  I am grateful to have a summer off.

I've been teaching full-time at SMC for the past two years, and in August, my contract becomes tenure track--hurrah!  I was on a year to year contract with the hope but not the promise of continuing in a full-time capacity; I taught five courses, but had no committee work requirement.  Now I'll teach a 4 course load, with some committee work.  The tenure track here stresses teaching and service to the college over publication, so I feel good about the next few years and my chance for success here.  More thoughts on that in the weeks and months to come.

Spring Semester Teaching--Done

I am tired, in that end of semester kind of way.  I'm done with grading--yesterday I submitted grades for all 7 (7!) courses I'm still teaching (there were 2 additional courses that ended April 17, and I got those grades done shortly after).  I am not done with seminary papers yet.  I have a sermon to write for Sunday, and because I'm going to be away, I need to get that sermon written by tomorrow.  No wonder I am tired.

I didn't write a blog post yesterday because I was looking at a noon deadline for grade submission, and I wasn't as close to being ready as I wanted to be--the same reason that I didn't do a morning walk.  When I got back from my early afternoon walk, I decided to see if I could get some grading and grade submission done for my Spartanburg Methodist College classes.  It was easier than expected, so I decided to get it all done, while nothing else was tugging at my attention.

Last night, we watched the original The Devil Wears Prada.  I wanted to be watching the sequel, but I didn't have the energy needed to go to a movie theatre--but the original was a treat.  I had forgotten how good that movie is.

This morning, I've done the tasks for open enrollment for benefits at SMC.  Now let me get to work writing that sermon. 

Retreat Chef

I have spent this week-end down at the Isle of Palms (near Charleston, SC), being part of a team that cooked for a retreat.  I used to cook for larger groups more often, so I knew I could do it.  But I'm also relieved that we're coming to the end of the retreat, and it's been a success.

We were helped by the fact that it's a group of people who are easy to cook for:  no dietary restrictions, no allergies.  We made pork tenderloin last night, and everyone ate it, and many went back for seconds.  Most of the participants spend much time in caring professions and providing care for family members--it's been years since anyone cooked for them, and they haven't been shy about expressing their gratitude.

It's an amazing kitchen--that helps too.  The kitchen has 2 dishwashers, 2 stoves, and 3 refrigerators.  It's got lots of equipment and all the basics, like dishes and silverware, every type of pot and pan, baking containers in every size and shape.

It hasn't all been cooking.  There's been Bible study and worship and lots of great conversation.  Back in October, on a chilly morning walk, when I agreed to help with the retreat, I hoped it would be this kind of experience.

It's been interesting being back at this retreat center, which is one of two Lutheran retreat centers in South Carolina.  I first came here as part of a campus group long ago in 1983.  My family came here in 1984 with a church group; it was the beginning of summer, and I wondered how I would last without seeing my college friends for a WHOLE SUMMER.

Now I'm thinking about coming back here at some point this summer to reconnect with old friends. 

I haven't done much grading, but I still have time.  Grades are due on Monday and Tuesday--plenty of time, but as I tell my students in the waning days of a term, not as much time as we once had.  I haven't done much writing, but there is plenty of time--a WHOLE SUMMER.

World Labyrinth Day 2026

   Today is World Labyrinth Day.   It's celebrated the first Saturday of May.

For more on labyrinths, this website is full of information. 

Below is  a poem-like thing with some of my favorite pictures of labyrinths I have known and loved:

We have walked labyrinths
made of fabric, made in fields,
laid out in tiles
or offered by cathedrals.

We have relied
on the promises of the labyrinth:
one path in, no dead ends,
no false turns, not a maze.

We have trusted
that the path leads
to a center that can hold
us all in all our complexities.

May Day Retreats

Today, instead of dancing around a Maypole or going to a protest march, I will load up the car and head down to the Coastal Retreat Center at the Isle of Palms.  This week-end's adventure: cooking for the week-end, in support of a deaconess friend of mine who got a grant to create this retreat.  She has a vision of a retreat before the hoopla of Mother's Day, a time to be apart together before we fall apart (she's got a snappier title that I can't remember right now).

I have friends, old friends, who live in the South Carolina Lowcountry near the Isle of Palms.  I thought about trying to see them during our bit of afternoon free time, but I decided not to try to see anyone.  Far better to arrange a separate trip later in the summer or fall.  In my free time, if there is any, I need to be grading:  I have one set of grades due on Monday and another set on Tuesday.

If there's any additional time, I need to remember that I do have two papers due for my Lutheran Confessions class.  I keep hoping that I might get feedback on the two papers that I've written since the first paper, but soon I'll just write the last two and hope for the best.

Yesterday I did many things, but writing a blog post was not one of them.  I created a master shopping list for the retreat so my friend could get the food at Costco.  I baked many batches of cookies and two cakes for the retreat--and ran 4 loads of dishes through the dishwasher.  I went to my Lutheran Confessions class, which meets by way of Zoom.  I took care of some financial stuff. I took a walk.  I sent e-mails to students to remind them that they needed to meet the final exam deadline, and I answered a few e-mails.

Today's blog post will be short--let me attend to students before doing the tasks that must be done before departure.

Poetry Creating Notes at the End of a Term

It's been a week of bits and pieces in terms of poetry.  Let me record some of them here:

--In my end of the semester cleaning up of the paperwork piles, I discovered lots of rough drafts of poems.  A few of them had some potential.  A few I couldn't remember where I thought the draft might be going.  A few I didn't remember writing at all.

It was good to remember that I did more than my computer files might indicate.

--I was making some poetry submissions to literary journals before the bulk of submitting season winds down.  There are moments when I wonder why I bother.  But the occasional acceptance still makes me happy, so I persist.

--As I was looking through my file of finished poems, I realized that I had revised a rough draft twice, once back in January when I first finished the rough draft and then again in April, when I had no memory of revising it back in January.  I haven't circled back to see which draft I like better.  It does bother me a bit that I had no memory of doing the original revision.

--On Monday, I was thinking about the trinity of nuclear war movies of the 80's, and I listened to this podcast about them and other nuclear war movies, including House of Dynamite.  As I drove down to Spartanburg, a line floated through my head:  The apocalypse will not be televised.  Once my students started writing, I put poem ideas on paper and ended up with a fairly good draft, just two hours after the line flitted through my head.

It's not the way I usually create poems, so I was happy to have that experience, especially in a very busy week.

The Last Day of Class

I had thought I might go for a walk a bit early to try to beat the thunderstorms that I can see on the radar, a large line heading our way.  But thunder rumbles outside, so I will stay put for a bit.  I'm not complaining--we're in desperate need of rain.

Today is the last day of in-person classes at Spartanburg Methodist College.  There's still a reading day and exams, but today is the last day of regular commuting to Spartanburg until August when classes start again.  After classes, I'll stay for the end of year celebration for Humanities graduates at a pizza place in town.

As with every semester, when we get to the end, I have a bit of whiplash--wasn't it just last week that I entered these dates into the syllabus?  Back in January, when I put the spring semester syllabi together, the 28th of April seemed so far away.  And now, here we are.

My brain can't seem to focus--or maybe it would be more accurate to say it focuses on one thing for one to five minutes and races on to the next thing.  I have a lot going on in the next two weeks:  both in-person and online classes ending, which means lots of grading, two papers due for my Lutheran Confessions class, two sermons to write, and a week-end retreat this week-end, where my spouse and I are the cooks.  I've done many job duties for retreats, but this will be my first retreat as chef.

I am making a shopping list for one of the retreat leaders who will be going to Costco on Thursday.  I find myself overly worried about leaving something off the list.  But there will be grocery stores, should we forget something essential.

I am also worried about the amount of food we need.  Is it too much?  Is our menu too expensive?  I also worry that we won't have enough--and again, I tell myself, there will be grocery stores, and people won't starve.  I am less worried about people not liking the  food.  We are good cooks.  I do worry about people not telling us about food they won't/can't eat until it's being served to them.  But they did have a chance to tell us on the registration form, and so far, no one has mentioned anything.

O.K., time to focus on something else.  Let me do some grading.

A Sunday of Donuts and Other Treats

In some ways, yesterday was a good Sunday.  We had a new member officially join us yesterday--she's the grown up daughter of a member, and she's been attending regularly since Christmas Eve.  It's our 3rd New Member Sunday in a year--hurrah!  

For the first New Member Sunday, the church council president got the donuts from an upscale donut place in Bristol.  For the second one, we stopped at Dunkin Donuts between Johnson City and Bristol.  Yesterday I went to Donut Stop in Arden, NC, a few minutes from my house.  They were actually open at 5 a.m., just as they said they were in various sites.  They had a huge variety of donuts--and they were delicious.

I didn't feel wiped out when we got home, as I sometimes do.  We took care of some paperwork tasks left over from the week before.  We watched the sermons of other churches, as we often do.  We cooked the salmon that we never got around to cooking on Saturday.  We watched some of the home remodel shows, one of our go-to genres that we both like to watch, as long as we don't get derailed into talking about our own home improvement plans.

We watched the Property Brothers restore 2 multi-million dollar mansions, which was a bit surreal.  The next show was set in Las Vegas, 2 flippers taking deeply run down properties and renovating them with constantly changing budgets that made no sense.  I realized how deeply tired I was.

It was only 6:45.  I told myself I was going to read in bed for a bit.  Maybe I could make it to 8:00, a bedtime that is barely respectable for adults:  toddlers get later bedtimes.  But I was asleep by 7:10.  I drifted off thinking about how the light outside was so similar to October early evening light.

Do I feel rested today?  Sort of.  But I am still facing a week full of tasks that can be exhausting.

Still, today and tomorrow are the last two days of my in-person classes meeting, which will free up a lot of time.  I will do what I always do:  make lists, get through the tasks on them, cross them off--and look forward to the time when I have less on the to-do list.

Jesus Remodels a Fixer Upper

I have been up early, both fretful and hopeful, thinking about taxes, thinking about home renovation shows and real life fixer-uppers, working on some poetry submissions.  Usually I'd be revising a sermon on Sunday morning, but I got that done last night, after an up and down day.

I was thinking of mid-life crises, how some of us buy convertibles and others buy run down houses to fix up.  I had planned to work on a poem about Jesus having a mid-life crisis and buying a run down house to renovate--the idea came to me on Friday.  But I worried that readers would reasonably point out that Jesus didn't exactly live until mid-life to be able to have a midlife crisis. 

My Jesus in the World poems can demand a willing suspension of disbelief, since Jesus is doing activities that he didn't do in the Gospels:  bowling, going to a holiday cookie swap, helping with hurricane clean up, and so on.  But I worried that mention of a midlife crisis would disrupt that suspension of disbelief.

This morning, the solution came to me, and it's so obvious I hesitate to admit that it didn't come to me sooner.  I can take out the reference to a mid-life crisis.  Let the reader decide why Jesus is buying a run-down house to renovate. 

There are so many wonderful ways this poem could go--it's so wonderful to have a glimmer of an idea that's closer to fully recognized than just a whisp and to have poem creation to look forward to in the week to come.

Friday: Bad Traffic, Good Fish Fry

Yesterday was the kind of commuting hell day that makes me happy that summer is coming, and I'll soon have a break from 6+ days of commuting.  

Driving down, I thought that I was lucky because I was headed east on I 26.  On the other side of the highway, an 18 wheeler lay on its side across the 2 westbound lanes, with cars off the road on either side.  The interstate was closed down, with traffic rerouted.

I wouldn't be headed back west for 5 hours, so I figured that it would be cleaned up by then.  It was, but there was another accident by then.  Happily, it wasn't as bad as the morning accident.  Further up the road, another accident slowdown, even though it was cleared up and on the other side of the interstate.

I left campus a smidge early so that we had some extra time to get to Bristol for the fish fry at Faith Lutheran.  By the time I got home, we just barely had enough time to get there--until we got to the next round of accidents.  We were 20 minutes late--I got there in time to thank the first round of diners for coming.  

We still had plenty of time to help out with the fish fry:  we got there at 5:20, and the event was over at 7:00.  Everyone was in good spirits, both the church volunteers and the community folks who came for a good meal and fellowship.  It was a great night.

It's an interesting event:  all the funds raised are for neighborhood charities, particularly the ones that feed people.  It's less about evangelism:  most of the people who come already have a church home.  It's a small community, so many of the people know each other, both the church members and the diners.  There are moments when I feel like I've fallen into a Norman Rockwell painting, and I mean that in the best possible way.  

Grading in the Wee, Small Hours of the Morning

I have been up for hours, literally hours, grading.  Two of my four online classes are finished, so I decided to get the grading done, since I couldn't fall back asleep after I woke up at 1:30.  So, I graded the final research essays, did some checking to make sure that I hadn't overlooked anything in the gradebook, and submitted final grades.  Submitting final grades isn't automatic.  I have to toggle between 2 tabs and enter in each grade.  But I now have submitted final grades for 2 of 4 online classes.

Am I caught up with grading?  Goodness gracious no.  It's the time of year when I won't really be done for another week and a half.  Papers are coming in, day and night.  But it does feel good to make progress.

Let me also remember that I continue to try to capture poem ideas.  Some have been in my head for months:  every time I see a tattoo, I think of a colleague who had a tattoo of a tomato plant on his arm, and I've been trying to capture that tattoo and give it a deeper meaning.  One idea came to me in a rush when I saw someone's online outrage post about a recent vote about allowing drilling/mining above the Northern Boundary Waters, which reminded me of a friend who died recently, and I tried to write a poem about both northern and southern waters and boundaries.  Neither poem is finished yet--in fact, I have yet to have crafted enough of them to know that I have a poem or just an idea.

Next year when my year-to-year contract converts to a tenure track faculty position, I'll teach one less class each term, and I'm looking forward to seeing if I get more writing done--by which I mean not just writing but actually getting to rough drafts and revised drafts. 

A Return--Briefly--to my Regularly Scheduled Thursday

My schedule today feels a bit crammed, but I remind myself that I've gotten spoiled.  For the past month, I haven't had my Lutheran Confessions class that meets by way of Zoom session on Thursday morning.  Today, I'll make the trek to the office even earlier than usual so that I can get my laptop set up for the class which starts at 8:45.  Then I'll have the last conferences of the semester with my creative writing students and then a writing day for my English 102 students.

I have my food packed--breakfast and lunch on campus.  I have my outfit picked out.  I am trying not to think about how tired I am and all I need to do in the coming weeks before we get to summer.

The last time we had an actual class meeting was March 19, which was the day after I had my meeting with the provost and my dean, where I was offered, and accepted, the tenure track promotion offer.    Part of my brain was thinking about all the implications of the meeting (happy implications) while I tried to focus on Reformation history and the class at hand.

In some ways, that's the story of the past year or two, or maybe my whole life.  I have multiple tracks in my head, multiple responsibilities tugging at me.  This week, I'm thinking about all the grading that I need to do, along with the paper for Lutheran Confessions that is due in a week, and oh, yes, a sermon for Sunday, let me not forget that.

When I step back, I reflect on the fact that I won't have to do this again--next week, my in-person classes are over.  Let me do what I always do:  take a deep breath, keep breathing, and keep prioritizing my to-do list.

A Different Kind of Getting to Know You Exercise

Let me remember to record a really neat getting to know you exercise that we did the first night at the Create in Me retreat.  It's something that could be modified for non-retreat groups, and I'll give some ideas at the end of the post.

Advent

Our retreat theme was "Nature, Imagination, and Liturgy," so our opening exercise revolved around the liturgical seasons:  Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Holy Week, Easter, Pentecost, and Ordinary Time.  

Epiphany

When we checked in, we had a nametag with a piece of colored paper in it--we sat at the table that had a larger sheet of colored paper that matched the color in the name tag.  It was a great way to make sure that we mingled new folks with returning folks.

Lent

The color of the paper matched the liturgical season (purple for Lent, for example).  We had a sheet of facts about the season, along with a small, blank banner.

Christmas

There was a table of all sorts of supplies.  Our project was to make a banner that matched the season, along with a song or prayer or poem.  We only had 20 minutes.

Ordinary Time

I admit that I was skeptical at first, as we sat there, every table staring blankly at the blank banner.  But it was a room of creative people, so soon we sprung into motion.  The energy level and discussion level rose.

Pentecost

When we were finished, we went around the room, explaining the banners and presenting our song or prayer or poem.  I was impressed with what we created--and impressed with how this exercise helped us get to know each other through a joint task and some friendly competition.

Easter

Could I create a non-religious variation for the first week in class?  I've used getting to know you Bingo, which is good.  The banner creating meant that people didn't have to move around the room and approach strangers, which is a plus for a lot of people.

Holy Week

I have a vision of this exercise, but with secular holidays and seasons, along with the holiday of Christmas, which is universal for my students.  Could non-creative students rise to the challenge?  I think they could.  Let me tuck this idea away.