Quack if you're grateful

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It happens probably every day. Usually a fleeting thought that I push away as it comes. I wonder for a moment if I ever will live in the tidy little cottage of my imagination. The one that sits on three acres, tucked off the beaten path, with lots of flowering trees and a picket fence and an enormous raised bed organic garden. The one that is always tidy. I push the thought away because that house is far. It's far from soccer and dance and the airport and Starbucks. And all my kids don't fit in that house.

So, it's pretty much a silly idea.

I live in suburbia. I can have an iced soy latte in exactly seven minutes after I decide I want it enough to go get it myself. Seventeen minutes if I dispatch a teenaged driver. More importantly, I can be sitting at the pedicatrician's office within ten minutes of discovering a child is sick. And I can be at the airport, kissing hello, within 20 minutes of the phone call from the runway telling me he's landed.

But I don't have flowering trees and a great big garden and quiet. I have neighbors. Lots of them. And not nearly enough nature outside my front door to suit me.

I live in suburbia. There are opportunities abounding for my children.

But I don't have wildlife.

Wait! What's this? "Come quick Mommy! The ducks are back. The ones that were here yesterday and the day before and the day before that! They're eating the bird seed!"

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We live no where close to the water.

These ducks are a gift. We sit quietly and watch them. Until suddenly Sarah figures out how to say "Quack" and she talks to them. They don't leave. They talk back.

Oh my goodness, Mama Duck is coming to visit! Right up to me, tiptoeing through the tulips.

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Well hello to you too, dear.

I think I might be Beatrix Potter.

Ducks, in my front yard. Fancy that.

I can almost see the picket fence.

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We're catching up on a couple of weeks worth of notables in the gratitude journal:

~blooming tulips (Patrick saw them)

~blooming bluebells

~rose bushes and peonies promising May flowers

~sunflower seeds, morning glory seeds, sugar snap pea seeds, spring lettuce on the way

~Nicky reading to me as I knit

~Katie chattering to me as I knit

~homecomings

~holding my boy as tears gather and fall

~Patrick home for just a day to say goodbye to a coach and hold his family close

~watching him reach out and touch an unimaginable grief and help to heal a friend

~Mike home on Monday night. Good night.

~Beatrix and Sarah and hugs so powerful they're tackles

~boys who hit it off (at last) and the nature that united them

~sunshine on my face

~godmothers, godchildren and annual reunions in the mud and majesty

~six meals made on the weekend. now we don't have to be home until dinnertime.

~sweet friend who is tinkering around on my blog, sprinkling happy dust, while I'm off playing in the woods.

~a holy week ahead

 

 

I have dirt under my fingernails

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and my face is sunburned and my hair is crazy curly with humidity and wind. We've been outdoors for days now and it's very good. But I'm way behind on --ahem--business. Please read this column to which I was supposed to link last week. It's a Lent sort of thing and you only have a few days before Lent is over. Besides, it will make my editor happy.

Who does God Want You to Be?

We Have Winners!

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The winners of the Bloggity Bigday Giveaway are:

Spud and Chloe at the Farm will inspire

Emily Hammer who said:

Your blog has touched my life and mothering in so many ways ~ thank you for that gift! Since I already own 2 of the lovely books listed...I would love to have Spud and Chloe at the Farm. Thank you so much for this opportunity!
God Bless You!

 

Small Steps will find its way to

Renee, who  said:

I would love a Small Steps for Catholic Moms. I am expecting baby #9, at age 45, and feel like my life is being taken in leaps and bounds. I want so much to take smaller, simpler steps.

Thank you for this blog. You have the perfect balance between reality and grace. You show your struggles, but you also share the grace you depend upon to live your life with joy. I want to be like you when I grow up ;)

Happy Anniversary!

Real Learning goes to

Elizabeth, your blog was one of the very first I ever read in the blogosphere! I ran into you from Dawn at Sun and Candlelight 4 years ago and have been with you through two pregnancies! Your honesty and spirituality have kept me coming back. My grandmother is catholic but my family is protestant. More than anything else here I see Jesus in you and have gleaned so much for my own family about your faith that I have incorporated into my own faith. I have cried and laughed with you, which seems so odd since we have never even talked before! Your CM homeschool ways have stuck with me no matter what other new ideas I've tried and I recently bumped into an old article of yours about living books that made me fall for this educational lifestyle all over again!

If a book should come my way it would have to be your Real Learning. I have your Small Steps and would love the knitting book except I can't knit! Have always wanted to read your original book.

Thanks for being here as a voice of truth in the big internet world of voices.

Please email with your mailing address and I'll get your prize out to you!

 

Five Minute Friday: Distance

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Mike is in Portland this morning. Yesterday, he was in Salt Lake City. Monday it was Houston. Distance. For the last 23 years of married life, there has been distance. Come to think of it, our engagement involved distance, too. We know distance. We know how to time phone calls for 8:00 my time/5:00 his time when he's working on the west coast. At home, we know how to shift the rhythms and expectations of a Sunday morning because someone has just arrived on the red-eye. We know exactly how long it takes to get to the airport.

We know homecomings. And we like them.

It won't be long now, just a few short weeks, and this life of frequent flier miles will come to a close. New job. Not nearly so much distance. Am I thrilled to pieces? Well, sure. I am. Truth be told, I'm a little nervous, too. Will he like being around all the time? Will we adjust to being in each other's spaces on the weekends. Actually, he will be in my space, won't he, because up until now, his weekend space was a production truck? I want him, look forward to him being there, but worry just a little that this space, this place called "home," might have looked better to him from a distance.

I'm re-thinking the weekend style, re-tooling around the house, almost as if I'm expecting an important guest. But he's not a guest. He's the person and the personality that has always felt "missing"--very much there in spirit as we go about our weekend busyness, but still off in the distance of the regular routine. Big gaping, 6'4" Daddy-sized hole that is filled with aching loneliness.

I wonder how many times I've driven to the airport since we moved to this neighborhood. I wonder how many times I've watched him zip that old green suitcase closed and swallowed hard so that I could say goodbye and he wouldn't hear the lump in my throat. I wonder how many weddings, funerals, and social gatherings of families I have attended without him, feeling awkward and out of place in the company of couples. I wonder how many times I've told a child," Daddy's working. He took an airplane to XXX." How many times I've rocked and distracted and tried to tell myself that he or she would be just fine, when really we were just limping along. I wonder how wonderful it is to live together all the time without distance.

I think I'm going to like discovering the answer.

Got five minutes? Tell us about Distance. No editing, no fussing, just five minutes of writing. And then link up over at Gypsy Mama's place.