If you get to North Carolina, you've gone too far

"If you get to North Carolina, you've gone too far."  Those were the final instructions in my mom's landmark-based directions to the secret woodland trail I was determined to find.  I laughed at the caveat, until we missed our first turn and crossed the North Carolina border.  Once we were on the right road, searching for the trailhead, we ended up in North Carolina again.  We turned around in the gravel driveway of a house that bore a sign: "Honk for service"  What kind of service?  You never can tell, with those North Carolinians.

We were headed back to the main road, having all but given up on finding the trail, hidden by years of memory, when the curve of a gravel side road caught my eye and I shouted, "Stop!"

My best friend and her husband were not only patient, but enthusiastic about searching for an unmarked trail I hadn't been to in oh, maybe eight years.  They are two people around whom I feel perfectly at ease being my genuine self, which is always a relief for an introvert.

Over a creek, hidden away in tall weeds, was an opening in the trees.  "This is it!  I think this is really it!" I crowed, and we piled out of the car.  We entered into the trail, enveloped by green and the patient words of the creek.

I'm not sure where the original knowledge of the trail came from, but my grandparents used to take us there in early spring.  We called it the Trillium Trail, partly because it didn't have a name we knew, mostly because the ground was covered in the elegant wildflower and when it bloomed, the forest floor was carpeted with fairy flowers.  On this cool Memorial Day, it was a little late for the trillium, but I had a deep desire to find the place and cement it in my mind as more than just a wispy, flowered memory from childhood.

Some trails have a solid feel, acceptable and approved places for human and nature to interact.  Ah, admire the wildflower.  Listen the birds.  Isn't nature a splendid thing for us to observe and enjoy?  Other trails, you feel as though you have stepped into a world quietly ignorant of you, a location out of time, not growing for our admiration but for the purity of its own existence.  You, the hiker, feel partly an intruder, partly a silent integration into the patient life cycle of the tangled woods.  Your words hang in the air when you speak them, then are hurriedly lost in the muffle of the trees.

It is those places that keep me going back to the woods.

Our discovery of a tiny spring house, green all over with moss, leaning permanently, confirmed that this was the place we sought.  I have a picture of my grandmother and my great aunt, in their older years but ever playful, pretending to hold up the leaning structure.  The spring house grows out of the hillside, over a tributary, as if it has always been there.  Looking up the hillside, we noticed one trillium variety still blooming: wine-colored petals hanging under a three-leaf umbrella.  I wanted to take pictures, because I always want to have pictures, but for all my wanting to have pictures I never can seem to remember to bring my camera.

We passed an older fellow who gave us a friendly greeting.  He seemed to know the trail personally.

The trail ended in a hot meadow at a turn of the creek.  We waded in the very, very cold water.  A trip to the mountains is not really complete until you stick some part of yourself in an icy creek.  We swung around on an old knotted rope but decided we didn't really want to get wet past our knees.  We headed back to the car and ate a picnic lunch by the water.  More people passed us.  It didn't feel so much like a secret anymore.

Back in the car, warm and sticky, we made our way back to the slightly flatter parts of Georgia.  I slept most of the way, tired and content.  Later we had a Memorial Day dinner with Katie's parents.

I hold this day in my memory as a reminder that days of simple and pure enjoyment exist, respites for us in a rocky life.  On that day, the sun shines, we laugh, we marvel at the tangled beauty of a Cherokee rose, we get mosquito bites, we sit quietly by the water.  The world had not yet turned sepia.  Everything is fresh and green and innocent.  

About Judy

My sister and I were blessed to know and have all four of our grandparents into adulthood.  We were the only grandchildren on one side and two of three on the other, so grandparently affection was overabundant for us and our cousin.  They doted, and we loved them all.

There were four of them.  This is about the last one.  I couldn't manage to speak at her funeral last Saturday, although there was a lot I wanted to say.  So instead I am doing something I'm much better at: writing in silence.

The three of us called her Judy, and I'm not sure why.  That was her name (short for Judith), and my sister, being the oldest, made the decision to call her that.  It worked out ok, though; it rolls off the tongue like other pet grandma names - Granny, Mimi, Nana - but it's unconventional, like her.  She later claimed she wished we called her GrandmaMA.  She was dramatic.

Judy and Daddy Earl (a good Southern name for a grandpa) lived 5 minutes away from us until I was in highschool and my sister was in college, when we moved to a neighboring town.  Consequently, they had a huge hand in raising us.  We were always at their house, being taught, nurtured, scolded, fed, and doing chores.  They built their house when my sister was a baby.  It was weird - it had honey-blond wood floors and ceilings, 20-foot-tall windows on the south wall, a fireplace of stacked stone they had personally dug up in the yard of their stony, wooded 20 mountain acres, and a swimming pool in the living room.  I kid you not.    It was always full of light.  It always smelled like delicious bread or oil paints.  She had a tinny-sounding piano that I played every time I was over.

Judy was a city girl from Atlanta.  She studied art at UGA until her friends introduced her to a boy from a farm in South Georgia.  She quit school and married him.  It was the 1950s.  Her parents didn't like him at first, because he was country, but she told them it was a "non-issue".  She was going to marry him.  I know this because, in the last few months of her dementia, she announced to me she was quitting school and getting married and there was nothing I could do about it - it was a non-issue.  Later, her parents loved him, like most people did.

She was quite naturally a teacher, and she had three eager granddaugthers to whom she constantly imparted both skills and strong opinions.  Like,

How to make French bread
How to paint a shadow
Never to wear white after labor day
The name of every plant that grows in the North Georgia woods
The best way to listen to music in the house is as loud as possible...while your husband is in the garden

She would praise you with one breath and criticize the way you did something the next.  Small things were a big deal, whether it was how the phrase of an aria crescendoed poignantly or how so-and-so did such-and-such and she just could not believe that.  She liked to have parties.  Dinner parties with friends or pool parties for grandchildren & friends.  She believed strongly in being socially tactful, which balanced nicely with her husband's introversion and bluntness.  Also, your shoes and your purse should never clash.  That was a piece of advice I never could manage to retain.

I can't block out how her personality began to change, first slowly, then dramatically after my grandfather died.  How her world got smaller and smaller as her dementia got worse.  I hate dementia.  In a way I lost her, one of my best friends, three years ago.  But now I'm given the chance to grieve.  A formerly central pattern of my life is gone.  A person who I loved, who shaped me, is not coming back, and she no longer lingers in a hazy state of confusion.  Praise God.

There is a time for everything under heaven.

Checking things off

Presenting the results of the completion (ish) of my D.C. bucket list!

We have...

The National Zoo

The National Arboretum (I have an unusual affection for trees)

It would appear that columns are grown, not built

A repeat of an old favorite, the Air and Space Museum on the Mall

Annapolis, home of the US Naval Academy, on a very cool and somewhat rainy day

Featured but not pictured:

The National Museum of the Marine Corps

      - volunteering there was a veteran of the battle of Iwo Jima.  We chatted, and I learned he taught music at Stanford University for years.  "Go to the museum website  and look up my name," he told visitors, "Frank Matthews - they have a lot of old pictures of me in the war and my story.  I don't like to look at all those pictures.  It's depressing - I was so much better looking back then."

(You can read about him here: http://www.usmcmuseum.com/pdfs/More_Than_Scuttlebutt1st_qtr_fy12.pdf)

Not checked off the list:

Monticello

A return to the Udvar-Hazy Air and Space Museum

What remains most important to me, though, is not the places that I visited, but the fact that I got to see them (most of them) with my parents.  After having spent a year in another country, getting ready to move 800 miles away, not knowing in which direction the next few years will take me - it was really lovely to spend time with my parents, enjoying our shared interests together (nature, history, being nerdy, etc).  I think we're all pretty confident it's time for me to move out, though!

Now there is a new list - Things I Must Do Today Before I Leave Tomorrow.

You and you only, first in my heart

You have been partly privy to it.  You've seen the reflection of changes in my life.  How experiences - gifts from God - have shaped, redirected my life.

You can recap if you like:

Ok, I'm ready!  Except, I'm not...
Rewind: Israel
Israel Rewind Part 2
Hobbits, Koreans, and Courage
Middle East, Episode II
Arrival
Seeds

Over the last couple years, my desire to serve long-term for God's Kingdom has been growing, gradually but steadily overcoming my desires to do anything else.  When I got back from Wales, I had a swell plan: get a nice job with my nice degrees, make money for a couple years, then go.  Except, I was having a really hard time finding a job.  And my heart wasn't into it.  And the thought of doing the 9-to-5 for two years while my true desires were elsewhere was seriously depressing.

You see, I was approaching it wrong.  I thought 1) I need to be a " financially responsible and respectable individual" before I can be a crazy missionary, 2) I need to get my house in order before I give it to God, 3) Work is separate from mission.  I still wanted to go....I was just, well, sidetracked.

A few months ago I had the honor of fellowshipping (it's a word, ok?) with a leader of the Chinese house-church movement.  If you know what Back to Jerusalem is, you've probably heard of him.  A few of my closest friends and I got to have dinner and spend quality with him.  At the end of the night he put his hands on us and prayed for us.  This man, who has suffered for Jesus like the apostles, who laughs and emanates the Spirit, prayed for us.  Prayed for our service to the Kingdom, on the mission field.

And I thought, what am I doing?  If I feel God calling me, why am I still frittering away my life on "man's empty praise"?  It's time to be obedient.

When he walked the earth, Jesus didn't call only people with respectable jobs, people who had it all together, and he didn't call people to follow him part-time.  He called people out of their respectable jobs, he called people without jobs, he called people with menial or really terrible jobs, and he said, "Leave it all and follow me."  He called people to give up their old lives and live a new one entirely for him.  He still does that.

God has blessed me with the opportunity to get hands-on training in a city that I love with people that I love while doing a job that I love.  So that's what I'm going to do.  I'm moving to Alabama in June to start all this.  As a big dreamer, I do a lot of talking about the things that I'm going to do.  It's time to stop talking and start doing.

Is it just me or does this tree look like a troll?

Ran across a troll recently.

Luckily he had already been turned into a tree.  Wouldn't wanted to have met him (or her) as a Real Live Troll.

Exactly two weeks remain of my stay here in the D.C. area.  Three weeks until I move back to Alabama.  That's three weeks of jobless, aimless fun (and some packing), still feeling like a student but without all the homework and the pressure of graduation.  Two years since I graduated from college, seven months since I came back from Wales.  Sheesh.  If I often ramble on about the passage of time on this blog, it's because I can never quite grasp its ever-fluctuating but never-ending march onward, as places, experiences, people slip behind me.

Which is partly why I aim to be a good bit more intentional with my time and my life from here onward.  I'm sure I'll explain a little more in-depth in a future post.

The Books Strike Back

It's movin' time.

Or, at least, packin' time.  Movin' time is kind of complicated, and involves more than one car trip south.  What that means for right now is shuffling my stuff around, getting rid of the excess, and packing it all in a well-ordered fashion.  This of course is super fun for me.  I'm not joking, it is legitimately fun - I may misplace things on a daily basis, live in a constant state of disarray, and put off necessary tasks until the last minute, but I LOVE to arrange and organize things.  It's like a puzzle - how can we arrange and store these items with the most efficient use of space, with the accessibility necessary, in the most logical way possible?  (I should mention that my tendency to live in disarray means that, when I do organize things, they don't stay organized, which means later I get to organize them again.)

Sometimes, organizing or packing is like real-life Tetris.  Especially when you're packing books.  Yesterday, I fetched a few book boxes from the garage (they're book boxes because they're small and sturdy) and went Tetris-crazy trying to fill every inch of space with book.  And I did a smash-up job.  Filled a box top to bottom with books, with hardly any nooks or crannies left unused.  Then I tried to move the box, so that I could start in on the next one.

It didn't budge.

So much for the most efficient use of space.  I took out 10-15 books, tried again.  Still wouldn't move.  Took out a few more, a few more, until finally it was light enough for me to pick up with some effort.  By then it was only about half-full.  Resigned, I filled the other two boxes half-full.  I need smaller boxes, and more of them.  Or I need to get rid of some books - but we all know that's not going to happen.

I promise I did not arrange these books to make me look as nerdy as possible.  It just happened that way.

This is maybe one-third or one-fourth of my books.  MAYBE.  

Suddenly, Summer

I have been complaining for months now about the cold weather.  "I haven't had a summer since 2011, I am so tired of being cold!" was my main complaint; you see, Welsh "summer" is significantly cooler and wetter than even the coolest Georgia/Alabama spring.  Even if I say I prefer cooler weather, the (not cold) hard truth is that I'm Southern deep in my blood, and it's going to take more than 12 months to acclimatize me to a cooler climate.
Therefore, up until last week I was bemoaning the Spring that yet to show its face, still wearing sweaters and scarves.
And then Summer came.  And now I'm melting.
But at least it's pretty.

This is not a cherry blossom.  But it's still pretty.

Let's Have Dinner

 Sharing a meal is often at the center of socialization.  Eating out is often at the center of socialization.  Why is this a good idea?  Well, you have a lot of choices, you don't have to do any work, and within a couple hours you have an out if you decide you've had enough socialization for one evening.

What about eating in?  I appreciate a good meal out as much as anybody, but as far as spending time with friends goes, I'd rather have a meal in with friends rather than go out.  Here are my top 5 reasons.

1) Communication.  Restaurants are often loud, you're crowded around a table surrounded by strangers, your server keeps popping up, and once you've finished your meal you have a limited time before the server starts eyeing you for taking up a table.  It's no coincidence this is at the top of my list; maybe it's because I'm a big fat introvert, but I'd take a quiet, private venue with the opportunity for sustained, personal conversation over a noisy, public place nine times out of ten.  I like to really get to know people and enjoy their company, and I think that a private atmosphere goes a long way in fostering that.  I mentioned above that eating out is a good way to have a set end to the socialization if you need to bow out early.  That's still true - but hopefully your friends would be sensitive to time.

2) Comfort.  I think it's far more comfortable to chill out in someone's kitchen/living room than in a restaurant.  And you can pop in a movie or play a game.  Relax.

Soup is easy, cheap, and delicious

3) $$$.  Assuming we're talking about restaurants a bit nicer than fast food, if you get everyone to participate in the cost of food, it's going to be significantly cheaper to cook in than eat out.  Now, I'm not suggesting that you prepare a huge meal and invite all your friends over for a dinner party; there's a time for that, but what I'm talking about here is casual, like hanging out + food.  Share the burden - if you're not hosting, bring food, come early to cook.  It doesn't have to be fancy.  Spaghetti is good, and cheap.

4) Fellowship.  This is kind of connected to Communication and Comfort, but goes a bit deeper.  Preparing a meal with people, helping clean up, hanging around while it's all going on - you get to know people.  You're doing life together.  If you're trying to make new friends, inviting them into your home to share a meal can go a lot farther than meeting them somewhere.

5) Food.  It may feel like there's more food options at a restaurant, but as someone with food allergies, I can attest that finding a dish that's free of allergens can be a seriously big hassle.  More than once I've ordered a dish and pushed part of it off to the side - or I've had to send something back because I asked for it without dairy and it came out with dairy.  This has been getting better in the last few years as more and more people are jumping on food-craze bandwagons or discovering they have food allergies, prompting restaurants to offer more allergy-conscious choices.  But then restaurant food often turns out to be a lot worse for you than you'd expect - cooked in creamy, buttery, sweet, delicious sauces.  Sometimes eating healthy means getting a salad without dressing, and honestly that just doesn't always fill me up!  When you cook at home, if you distribute food responsibilities, you can a) know what's in the food, b) be sure that there's an allergen-free option for your friends, and c) easily have healthy options.  Also, some of us (cough, me) love to cook, and feel silly going all-out for one-person meals.  Having friends to cook for makes me really happy.  You can share recipes and ideas.

Half cheese, half no cheese - perfect for sharing!

Just to be clear, I'm not suggesting you never eat out with your friends.  I'm just advocating for swapping some of those meals out for meals in.  You might find it's more fun and more rewarding than you expected, and a little easier on your wallet.

Another perq to having spaghetti is the artistic possibilities