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Walk With Me
The other week I took a long walk with a new friend. From our southwest London neighborhood, we walked through the commons to Richmond Park where – oh the blessed history of it all – King Henry the 8th used to hunt deer. Six miles on foot, lunch by the Thames, and a bus ride home on a double decker. Pure loveliness. Walking with someone carries certain, yet unspoken, expectations: you’ll travel in the same direction, often side by side. You’ll talk. You won’t pop in your ear buds or take a prolonged phone call. The walk is the means by which you spend time together. Specific destinations and step…
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Give Weeds a Chance
My garden weeds were actually flowers. I just didn’t know it a few months back. I almost pulled those gangly eyesores. But the pink roses that bloomed unexpectedly in my own back garden, without any help from me, prompted me to take a wait and see approach. After all, I had limited horticultural knowledge in the States; I was even more clueless here in the strange and bipolar climate that is London. So I left those weeds alone, let them get good and ugly. Then a peculiar thing began to happen. They bloomed. They turned into this: And this: Even the vine arching our front door produced these masterpieces, as…
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Just an American in England on the 4th of July
4th of July, 2019. It’s strange to be here in lovely London. Today will not include fireworks or sparklers or hotdogs or star-shaped, red Jell-O jigglers or parades or flags waving or freedom from school. It will include watermelon and corn on the cob corn salad and celebrating with American friends. It’s just past eight in the morning and the hubs and I have already sung along to Proud to be an American and John Mellencamps’s Pink Houses (aka Ain’t that America). Undoubtedly the words Oh say can you see will escape my lips at some point today; it can’t be helped. And once you start in on that bravado…
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What Remains
If you would have told the me in this picture, the me of 4 days ago, that Notre Dame would go up in flames, I wouldn’t have believed you. Having walked the city for thirteen miles the previous day, we were tired, on the last leg of our 36-hour jaunt in the city before returning to our friends’ house on the outskirts of Paris. “You at least have to see Notre Dame,” I told my fourteen-year-old. “You can’t go to Paris and not see Notre Dame.” Three days later, back in London, watching the cathedral engulfed in flame on BBC News, I wondered if this statement would be tragically and…
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Learning London
I never expected to mourn the loss of a three-ring-binder, but I have. Thinking I was smart to save on room/weight when we moved overseas, and assuming I could easily buy a three ring binder once in London, I packed my plastic sleeve encased recipes without the binder, only to find that three ring binders don’t exist here in the UK, only two ring binders. A two ring binders seems close to a three ring binder, but it doesn’t work with my recipes. Close, but functionally different. The US and the UK may seem culturally similar, and in some ways we are, but our (mostly) common language can blind us…
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Treasure Up
With the hoopla over and done with, Christmas odds and ends now line store shelves bearing garish clearance priced stickers, just as Christmas leftovers line our refrigerator. (Is anyone going to eat the rest of this turkey? Please?) Carol singing and candle-lit services give way to the cold reality of January and our mentality shifts from the magic of it all to monotony: back to work and school, back to trudging through snow and waiting for busses and paying credit card bills… and cleaning out the fridge. The advent book we started but failed to finish sits on the coffee table like a half done To Do List. (I can’t read…
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A Pilgrim in Progress
Since the world outside of the U.S. doesn’t celebrate Thanksgiving, here in London this past Thursday was, in many ways just another ordinary day. Except that it wasn’t. It was Thanksgiving, my favorite holiday. So Doug and I traveled into the city on a jammed packed rush hour train to attend “Thanksgiving Day Service for the American Community in London” at St. Paul’s Cathedral. It was grand and gorgeous. We sang Come Ye Thankful People Come and America the Beautiful (sniffle, sniffle) accompanied by a thousand other Americans living in the UK, and a hearty pipe organ. Yet if I could have blinked and transported across the ocean, to my…
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Queued for Grace
I limped over the UK border at my weakest point, and perhaps that was for the best. The plane ride from Chicago to London was wonderfully uneventful, until the final hour when my insides turned against me. Not the kind of turning that left me reaching for that little paper bag in the pocket in front of me, but the kind that caused me to dash to the minuscule loo more than once, despite the illuminated fasten seatbelt sign. Yep. That kind. Sorry if this is getting all too personal. I debated whether to write this blogpost and after I wrote it, debated whether to publish it. They say good…
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I blinked
Wasn’t it yesterday that we forgot the chicken in the microwave? That day when the nurse called to tell me that my strep test came back negative, but my pregnancy test came back positive, and in our delirious excitement we neglected the chicken thawing in the microwave for dinner, forgot about it until breakfast, and went out for celebratory pizza instead? Didn’t that just happen? Wasn’t that baby just born, that sweet pink baby that kept us up at night, that toddler with the infectious laugh and lively eyes, who learned to ride a bike, then mow the lawn, then shave? How can it be that, days ago, we dropped…
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When Hope Died
Oh it was bleak Those days in between. When hope was dead. Not wounded or missing, ill or asleep but dead. Lamb followed freely to the execution tree And before their own eyes, hope breathed his last. Spear pierced in, evidence poured out Body was lowered, wrapped-up, entombed. Hope said it himself, with final exhale: It is finished. What was finished? Light? Life? Goodness? Hope? Darkness cackled, death crowed Evil cheered, despair rose. But sun set and sun rose. Sun set and sun rose. Sun set and sun rose. And then. And then what was hidden rushed forth What was humiliated became adored What was impossible came to be What…