Rum colored sun and warm buttery leaves

Is this still Indian Summer? Or just a dry, lazy fall when the sun shines with moderate warmth almost every day, but the frost creeps over everything at night? The leaves have most turned from green now, some yellow, some orange, some red, and a few millions of them shades in between: tumeric gold, lime mixed with lemon, russet red, bland pie-crust tan.

Maria and I walked to the university library yesterday, in fleece jackets that we unzipped once the hill blocked the wind and the sun was on our backs. The sidewalks were warm through the soles of my shoes, and the dried grasses along the walk crumbled crisply when I fingered them. It felt good to scuff the layers of cottonwood leaves underfoot and the wind played with us, grabbing handfuls more from the branches and scattering them over our rumpled path. Then a car would hum by, and a drift of dry, weightless foilage swirled after it in a quiet wake.

I want to decorate for Thanksgiving. I see fat miniature pumpkins and fragile maple leaves, dried to perfection. I want to trace my hand and try to turn it into a turkey. We need to warm up the apple juice and add cinnamon sticks, to make desserts full of walnuts and pecans and pumpkins and squash. We should rake the leaves and scatter them again, we should carve a pumpkin, just for fun, and let the candle-light smile at us while the seeds brown in the oven.

Poem for my mom, and pretty much everyone in my family

To Be Of Use by Marge Piercy

The people I love best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and wim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half-submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and themuck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that hels corn, are put in mueums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.

Cheese by Capon, quoted by Wilson

"Cheese is at once a testament to the Creator's ingenuity in providing enzymes and bacteria that will do fearful and wonderful things for milk and to man's audacity in the face of some pretty forbidding stuff. The blander varieties, of course, are hardly more alarming than milk itself; but the farther reaches of the subject put even brave men to the test. There are cow's-milk cheeses that will convince you that someone has dragged the whole barnyard indoors, and goat's milk cheeses which taste as if the goat sat in them . . . The first man is of the earth, earthy. If I had only a single temporal blessing to wish you, I would not hesitate a moment: May you be spared long enough to know at least one long evening of old friends, dark bread, good wine, and strong cheese. If even exile be so full, what must not our fullness be?" (Robert Farrar Capon, The Supper of the Lamb, p. 148).

Talking to Myself

Lately I've been trying to talk to myself a lot more. It's something that both Doug Wilson (in the sermon last Sunday) and then Nancy Wilson (in the Bible study Wednesday) have been shoving at me, and finally, it came through. God just had to re-send it.
What am I talking about? Well, when things are rough, we usually do one of two things: we either talk to ourselves or listen to ourselves, and these two options really don'y go on at the same time. Listening to oneself might sound something like one of these: I'm such a failure at this... I'll never get my assignments all done on time... Why is he so mean to me... God doesn't even care... and you get the picture. This is what our fallen hearts do to us all the time- maximizing our trials and troubles so that all we do is drag ourselves down into the mire of self-pity or doubt or bitterness.
Talking to oneself is more like: Look at what you've made it through already!... This is all for your good... God gave this to you... He will help you... Remember to sing...
Pastor Wilson was using David as an example. You've seen those Psalms- they start with depression, Where are You, Lord? and end with, The Lord will deliver. David starts to tell himself what he knows is true, instead of doubting.
It is true that you can change your own mood.

School mode note to self

School started a few days ago and I wonder again, what have I gotten myself in for?

Enormous reading loads from books with names like Herodotus, A History of Knowledge, Greek Lives and Reformed Dogmatics. Multiple assignments weekly. Teachers who specify things like "don't be shallow," "I expect you to contribute; if you're shy, get over it" and "you are responsible to know everything I say in this class." Presentations 10 minutes long, 5 minutes of questioning following. Choir sessions where the right notes won't come out no matter what. Sometimes I think my head can't possibly get around half of what is expected, and I want to be completely immature and complain about these tasks; after all, there are so many things I would rather be doing than memorizing dates and practicing geometry and finding out how to put latin words into perfect passive conjunctive! Yup.

So. Why am I doing all this?

Because when I'm not groveling in my self-pitying mode, I know how much of a gift all this is. I remember that knowledge is worth the effort it takes to pursue it. I see the goals, quavering off somewhere in the future, that I am working for... I want to be able to give to someone else, all my life, and this is all in preparation for that. Because so many people have sacrificed and are sacrificing for me to learn what I am studying now.

Forget the headaches and the tears as I frustrate over assigned reading and supplemental reading and online reading and handouts and the school handbook, and hands and eyes sore from taking notes in class and penciling notes in books and typing on the computer, correcting and re-typing. Forget the less-than-satisfactory grades scrawled across the difficult test. Remember mornings in class with 40 friends with fresh notebooks and open books discussing what they have learned and expect to be asked about. Remember standing to sing or pray with the professor and the voices that have learned to harmonize. Remember the excitement of that professor as he gives to you what he so clearly loves. Remember the long-worked for nod of approval and brief "Well done" at recitation. Remember being asked to Sunday dinner, laughter at freshman creative sketches, and going to ice cream to celebrate the final math exam being over.

Whether I am able to complete my tasks perfectly, we shall see. My skeptic little brain doubts it. What is left for me is to give faithfully to this vocation. Con-fidence.

creative sketch

The Power Line

It carries electricity across my grandpa’s property. In a wide swath it goes through cedars and firs and hemlock, dipping and rising over hills, a row of silver skeletons heading toward the Canadian border. The legs are braced with dozens of steel shafts, and the short, bent arms hold up the wires.

The wires perpetually hum, carrying voices and lights north and south, connecting the far parts of the earth. Hidden in long, twisted cables that drag low the lines between the great structures, the weight of that power pulls at the insulators. And it pulls us closer.

We grab the flat metal framework, warm from sunlight, and pull ourselves up on the lowest crossbars. The leaning legs are tall, and the supports aren’t close enough together to monkey-bar up; the heads of the bolts stick out on this side, but their knobs are too far apart for footholds. I stare up at mathematical shafts intersecting between me and the sun, T-ing and X-ing steadily upward. Bracing feet and arms against opposite angles, we inch slowly higher, the narrow shanks hard against back or shoulder or palm the only forces we can feel. The air seems still, but between the bars of this tower I can see trees moving at the edge of the woods.

One arm caught fast around the upright at my left, I hang powerless. I am on a web turned steel, perfect and grey, planned and purposeful, catching the light across this corner of Grandpa’s land.

I wrote this in Rhetoric class a few months ago.