:: a new home ::

It has been over a year now since I last posted on Today's Lessons, and I've missed your company. I've finally decided to set up some new digs, and I'd like to invite you to my new home on the web. Jump on over here to see what's new and say hello. I hope to reconnect with old friends and maybe make some new ones. Please excuse the dust. It's still somewhat of a construction zone over there.

::: taking a break :::

Dearest blog friends and family,

It's not you, it's me.

I'm taking a break from blogging for a while. I'm getting a bit sick of myself, can't believe that others aren't quite sick of me, too.

It's not that I have nothing to say (HA! As if!). It's just that I'm not all that sure that what I have to say matters. Or that I'm the right vehicle for those thoughts. Words tumble all over the web every day, you know? Do you really need any more words?

Perhaps I'll climb out of the ashes a shining, renewed, colorful me.

Perhaps I'll just stay a heap of ashes.

Until then, keep pursuing truth and kindness.

Love,

Thicket Dweller

::: being seven :::

Turning seven is a pretty big deal. When you're seven, you're over halfway to teenagerness. When you're seven, you're not a baby anymore. When you're seven, you can read and do math and go to pottery class. Seven-year-olds can choose to act like a kid, or choose to be very grown up.

Seven means Barbie cakes and pink guitars and ruby slippers and scooters with frillies on the handles. Seven means missing teeth and new teeth and loose teeth.

Seven can't be six anymore, but can still read Now We Are Six anyway, and can especially like the Buttercup Days and Forgiven poems.

Seven means that you've finished your math primer and you know how to count by 2's, 3's, 5's, 10's and 100's. Seven means that you know that Lake Superior looks like a wolf's head, and that Benjamin Franklin had an almanac. Seven means that you know all about gravity and Sir Isaac Newton and prisms. Seven thinks King Arthur is boring, until Mama starts to read, and then she has a lot of questions and some very strong opinions about Sir Kay and Morgan la Fay and Vivian.

Seven can tie her own shoes and slice her own strawberries. Seven can rollerblade and practice her voice lessons. Seven can do a pas de chat and a grand plié and a tendu.

Seven has a bed of her own with a pretty pink, yellow and white quilt, but can still sleep with her big sister, if she wants to (and if big sister allows), especially when the heat goes out on a cold, snowy night. Seven loves Polly Pockets, lip gloss, stripey leggings and yummy-smelling lotions.

When you're seven, everything is very big, and everything is very possible, and everything is very important.

If you want it to be.

::: still winter :::

I've been hearing a lot of people murmuring wistfully that they wish this snow would melt. They're ready for SPRING, they declare, wrapping their arms around their sweatered torsos while affecting a theatrical shiver. And while I will concede that this winter has given us a pounding of precipitation, I have to give it credit; it's a winter, I tell ya, a genuine, bona fide winter. None of those half-hearted "dustings" or anemic "flurries" for us here in the midwest. We've had one serious snowstorm and blustery blizzard after another, transforming major metropolitan areas into thick blanketed ghost towns, making our rural roads impassable and turning my country lane into a snowbank lined luge track. It stops people in their tracks, slows us all down, shows us we're simply not in control.

And I like it.

My fourteen-year-old son isn't the one who checks the school closings hour-by-hour, beginning the night before. I am. My children aren't the ones standing at the patio door with their noses pressed against the cold, frosty glass, watching the giant flakes float from a bright blue sky. That would be me. And while you would say, "Well, it's pretty, but I don't like to drive in it," neither do I, which is why I don't. It's those snow days that get me off the hook, give me permission to stay at home, rent an iTunes movie or three, plant myself on the couch with a few good books, spend a day in the kitchen making bread or pizza or soup or some new recipe that happens to call for things that I already have in my pantry. On snow days, I get a reprieve. On snow days, all bets are off.

I'm not really sure why this is, because, as a stay-at-home mom, I generally get to determine what does and doesn't get done on any given day. Still, the days usually find me not staying home but trotting from store to store and place to place collecting chipped coconut or tamarind or sheep grain or three ring binders or Dad's blood pressure medicine or someone's forgotten coat/hat/shoes/iPod. I go to meetings and concerts and plays and programs. Even when I'm home, I open the door to repairmen, salesmen, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Amish guys selling assembly-line, fundraiser pizzas.

When the snowstorms comes, though, I know that no one's going to brave my luge track to hand me a Watchtower or peddle a pie. I'm safe to leave my hair uncombed, wear my comfortable elastic-waist pants with the hole in the butt and leave my face bare. I don't have to make the bed, if I don't wanna, and I don't have to shovel the walkway. But I CAN if I WANT to, see. I've got all the time in the world.

Winter allows layers of clothing. I can wear my sweater leggings and laced black boots under a corduroy skirt, a cotton shirt, an earthy sweater and a jacket, my toasty leather mittens with the fingered liners inside, and a thick, fluffy scarf. The perfect ensemble to hide all of my wobbly bits.

And, besides, what happens when this gorgeous blanket of white succumbs to a warm March rain or an unexpected February sun? Do midwesterners really believe that melting snow in January is a harbinger of Spring? Do they not remember their many, many years of living here, in a place where snow continues to fall and snowstorms stack up, sometimes into early May?

When the snow melts in the first quarter of the year, my friends, what we are left with is mud. Puddles and pockets and pits of mud. When the white stuff relents, we are left with a mess, the detritus of winter's litterers unveiled. Now, instead of a harmless puddle of melted snow beside my kitchen door, I'm faced with a heap of mud-encrusted shoes, clothes and children. The dogs no longer leave little wet footprints when they bound in from an outdoor romp, but sploshy smears of sludge. The passel of piles of poo that sunk, steaming, beneath the snow upon first deposit and lay preserved through the months of December, January, February, are now exposed and thawed, sodden and bloated, waiting for an unsuspecting child's, repairman's or Jehovah's Witness's shoe to carry them through the door, onto the white carpet or the wood floor where I find the remains later after feeling a slight wetness on the bottom of my last pair of clean socks.

Yes, Spring will come. When mid-April arrives, her spikes of green crocus leaves breaking up the monochrome, immutable landscape, Spring will come. It will not arrive sooner, no matter how we wish and whine and swear and shiver. It will not arrive in late February or mid-March or early April. For some of us, it will not arrive in early May. So, let's have Winter, shall we? A real, bona fide winter! With the countrysides cloaked in quilts of blue and white, stitched in sticks of black, bejeweled with icicles and spangled with glistening powder, canopied by skies of blue and hazy snowblink, occasionally leaving a gift of fleeting, photogenic air and surface hoar, begging to be admired, gone by the first glance of the sun.

As I look out the window, I'm thrilled to find a fresh batch of flurries gliding to the ground. I'll shove my toes into my comfy slippers and make a cup of hot tea.

It is still winter, after all.

::: creating a place for repentance :::

Have you read anything by Ann Voskamp? Have you read her beautiful blog, seen her beautiful pictures? If you haven't, you really must. If you have, be sure to read today's entry, When a Family Needs a Fresh Start. Ann's words are art. Her photographs, likewise.

Our family definitely needs a place for repentence and forgiveness these days. Thank you, Ann, for the tactile approach.

::: twenty :::

Happy birthday, Bard. I've known you for half my life, and you've made it an amazing second half. 

::: snowflakes :::

Out of the bosom of the Air,
Out of the cloud-folds of her garments shaken,
Over the woodlands brown and bare,
Over the harvest-fields forsaken,
Silent, and soft, and slow
Descends the snow.

Even as our cloudy fancies take
Suddenly shape in some divine expression,
Even as the troubled heart doth make
In the white countenance confession,
The troubled sky reveals
The grief it feels.

This is the poem of the air,
Slowly in silent syllables recorded;
this is the secret of despair,
Long in its cloudy bosom hoarded,
now whispered and revealed
to wood and field.

~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

::: winter cats :::

::: alas! how changed from the fair scene :::

When winter winds are piercing chill,

And through the hawthorn blows the gale,

With solemn feet I tread the hill,

That overbrows the lonely vale.

O'er the bare upland, and away

Through the long reach of desert woods,

The embracing sunbeams chastely play,

And gladden these deep solitudes.

Where, twisted round the barren oak,

The summer vine in beauty clung,

And summer winds the stillness broke,

The crystal icicle is hung.

Where, from their frozen urns, mute springs

Pour out the river's gradual tide,

Shrilly the skater's iron rings,

And voices fill the woodland side.

Alas! how changed from the fair scene,

When birds sang out their mellow lay,

And winds were soft, and woods were green,

And the song ceased not with the day!

But still wild music is abroad,

Pale, desert woods! within your crowd;

And gathering winds, in hoarse accord,

Amid the vocal reeds pipe loud.

Chill airs and wintry winds! my ear

Has grown familiar with your song;

I hear it in the opening year,

I listen, and it cheers me long.

~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

::: and the winner is... :::

Congratulations to the winner of the Coal Train Railroad CD! Debbie was chosen at random from those who responded to the review of Coal Train Railroad's jazz for kids album. I hope you and your little ones enjoy it, Debbie! Let me know whether you'd prefer a digital or a hard copy of the CD. If you'd like a hard copy, send me your mailing address.

Thanks to all who entered. Now, go pick up a copy of Coal Train Railroad for yourself!