Kitchen Therapy (Slice 4)

There is something completely therapeutic about working in the kitchen. I really don't understand people who don't love to cook, as it's something completely ingrained in me. I have a photo (see below) in my current kitchen of me as a child, helping my mother in our kitchen (at the aforementioned Pottersville house), and it makes me smile whenever I see it, that even then I loved this thing. I was thinking of this today, as I spent a couple hours making my dinner. It was a new recipe, and I don't think it'll be a repeat, but I was smiling to myself at how I was enjoying it.

It's a sensory thing, for one: the sizzle and hiss--smell, sound, feel--of onions hitting the hot cast iron, the way they turn a new color as they're stirred; the way my chef's knife organizes the disorder of spinach leaves into uniform strips of green; the way flour and butter thicken milk to a bubbling gravy. These are simple things, and I love them for it. I love that, given enough time in my kitchen, all other stress can pass from my head. I love trying new things, learning new things, and the feel of success and accomplishment when it turns out. (I don't really mind when it doesn't--so long as it's edible, which it generally is.)

I joke with people that I am a not-so-secret fifties housewife, minus the husband. I love nothing more than cooking for other people--one person or a crowd. A friend identified it as a love language, and I had to agree--it's a way I demonstrate love, compassion, hospitality. And don't get me wrong, there are days when I don't feel like cooking, but in general, it's something I look forward to, even--especially--after a crazy day.

This same friend and I were laughing the other day at the idea of either of us settling down with a man who only ate pizza and hamburgers. A marriage with such a man would never work--he would starve in my kitchen. I don't try to nail down particulars with God about the man He has for me, but one thing has to be certain: he's an adventurous (and enthusiastic) eater--or he'll learn to be with me.

(Incidentally, that's Mewie--also mentioned in yesterday's slice--in the bottom right. A cat is a necessary kitchen companion...)

Home (Slice 3)

I've had a thoroughly boring day (which is to say, full of much-needed rest, watching movies on my laptop, and eating leftovers), so I went scrolling through other Day 3 slices for inspiration, and found it (thanks, Jee!). "What is home to you?"

I was snagged by this question, and it made me think of several things in quick succession. My brain is a little sludgy from the day, so I'm feeling like vignettes may be the call for this slice...

I.
It's strange how a childhood house, even a fairly short-term one, works as a default setting for the word "home." Mine is a 3-bedroom ranch on McCann Mill Road in Pottersville, New Jersey. It was brick-red when I lived there, though it's been painted since. It's surrounded by a forsythia hedge, a wall of bright yellow for a few weeks each spring. And the yard runs down past the big tree (where Seal, our childhood mutt, was chained up in good weather), past where my mother kept the garden (the chicken wire forever bent toward the earth from the trespassing deer) to the Black River at the back. I don't remember as much of this place as I think I do, but it's filled with vignettes of its own: learning to cook and bake with my mother; discovering Seal's puppies upon coming home from Kindergarten one day; restaging the movie "Willow" in Legos with Matt in his room; my mom carrying Mewie to my bed when she (the cat) was too old to jump there. And while we only lived there a few years, that's where my brain goes when it hears the word.

II.
When I was a junior in high school, my best friend was upset that they might be moving from the only house she'd ever known. She was crying on the phone, and apologizing to me because she knew that I'd moved a few times already, so she felt bad for mourning over something I never had. I remember not knowing how to process that. Had I never had a home? Everything else in my life seemed so up in the air then, that I couldn't really answer the question. It still nags at me every once in a while (which is, perhaps, why it caught my attention tonight).

III.
For most of my life, my Fun Trivia Fact to share at ice breakers and cocktail parties has been that I was born in Alaska. We moved six months later, and I thus have no childhood memories of it, but it doesn't keep me from claiming it as identity-influencing. (I also spent a good deal of my fourth-grade year trying to convince my classmates that I was an Eskimo. At the time, I was certain it was true.) But in 2002, just before high school graduation, I got to go back and visit for a week. I would spend the next couple years trying (unsuccessfully) to put how it made me feel into poetry. In a word, it was a homeland, an idea I had never thought I could understand. I still can't explain it, but there was something about it that settled me. I remember sitting on the slopes of tundra in Denali, and wondering how I could be attached to earth. I still don't know.

IV.
I was just chatting with a coworker about this a couple days ago: the Eastham Public Library on Cape Cod might be my most treasured building. It is the only place I can go now that is entirely unchanged from when I was 5 years old. (This used to be my grandmother's house, but she moved and it was sold in 2004.) We went to the Cape every year of my childhood, and after a few years of separation, I'm back to visiting a few times a year. And the first time I was back, a couple years ago, I went with my uncle to the library. I didn't need anything--which is to say, I'd brought my own books--but stepping into the Children's Room, I was suddenly home (though a few feet too tall). I could see myself waiting (my mom, brother, and grandmother up in the adult stacks), happily curled up with Yertle the Turtle and Other Stories and hoping that Morris, the library's resident cat, would come by. I'm sure the place has been painted a few times, and they've probably switched from Dewey to LOC, but someone there loves me and they have, for the most part, kept with museum-like perfection my favorite room in the world.

V.
Home is where my mother is. This has always been true for me--not just a sentimental musing, but truth. When we moved my senior year in high school, she asked after a few weeks if I felt at home yet. I answered without hesitation, and I think she thought I was just trying to make her feel better. I helped her pack and move out of that house last summer, and while it twinged a bit of nostalgia, I found that I wasn't as upset as I'd expected. A few months later, I entered for the first time and entirely recognized her new house in Iowa as home. I don't know how much of it is in my head, how much of it is tied to the stuff--the woven-bark wastebaskets and kaleidoscope candles and the smell of something recently-baked--but it's still true: after my last spring conference in Chicago this May, I'm coming home to a place I've never lived, but home it remains.

Sharing Stories in the Dark (Slice 2)

I don’t know when it started, but going to the movies by myself has become one of my most loved escapes. I don’t go as often as I did a few years ago (when I averaged a movie per week), because real life, real story, outweighs what happens on a screen. But I still love stepping into a different world, seeing how life looks through other eyes. And while I like the social nature of going with a friend or a crowd, I LOVE going by myself, being part of a semi-connected audience that might laugh and cry together, but won’t ask, “What did you think?” at the credits.

That’s the real gist of it, I suppose. Beyond the atmosphere (the friendly dark settling in, the perfect fixation of sitting just close enough to catch the full screen in your peripherals), I love the level of community. We are strangers sharing stories in the dark, and we will go our different roads home and remain strangers, but for a couple hours we will be tied up together in someone else’s world.

I went to see “The Artist” earlier this week, and completely loved it. As a verbose sort, I am enthralled when someone can craft a beautiful, engrossing story with so few words. And I was glad I saw it in the theater: there was something perfect about sitting in a mostly-empty theater, sharing this dip into the past with a handful of anonymous reactors scattered behind me.

I think I love other stories so much because they remind me that I’m writing my own. Sometimes I think about God’s focus on each of our stories in this context. It’s an imperfect metaphor—an audience has no power of deus ex machina—but I think there’s a note of truth to it: that He, in his infinity and immeasurability, sits in the third row, just close enough to see everything, and pours Himself over us like laughter and tears.

Slice One: Weather as Identity

So my good buddies Ruth & Stacey (Two Writing Teachers) encouraged me to take a crack at their Slice of Life blogging challenge: essentially, accountability for writing at least once every day for the month of March. Not wishing to be called yeller, I accepted the challenge. :)

Let's do this thing.

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It's snowing today in Maine, and I was going to write about how the weather in influences the identity of New Englanders, myself included. But it snows often here, and I can write about that another day, perhaps. For the moment, a different sort of weather is on my mind.

Because three days ago, I was in Jamaica under a sun that seems to hang lower than it does here, with a close humidity that seems to be magnetically pulled in once any sort of exertion is begun. The land seems baked and soft, sweet with sugar cane and orange groves, and the breeze personifies palm trees, letting them wave their arms lazily against the deeply blue sky. There is a constant hum of insects, the river, sugar cane harvesters, footsteps on the dirt road.

And the people are marked by all of it: a slowness not born of sloth or inability, but of understanding that speed only exhausts. Workers follow the shade around a building, and rest comfortably when they need to. "Jamaican time" is understood and always in effect: a small flexibility to what elsewhere are hard-and-fast rules of punctuality. Conversation--alternating between accented English and patois--are casual and loose, rarely raised in volume, peppered with soft laughter. It's not a permanent paradise, it can't be, but it's easy to think so: to step onto Jamaican soil is to loosen the collar, smile easier, check email less frequently. "Yea, mon," falls from your tongue sooner, and more authentically, than you would expect--but leaves your vernacular shortly after the return trip home.

And today I am back at home, back at work, back to the usual. With fresh-fallen snow covering most of my window, it's increasingly difficult to remember--by which I mean, mentally experience and not simply recollect--the feel of Jamaican sun and soil. It's not to say that I prefer the exotic--I loved my visit, but here I'm home--only that we are shaped by where we live. A land closely surrounded by turquoise seas and consistently well-heated by a golden sun will raise a different people than the ragged New England winters which yield to bright, temperate summers and definitive autumns. We are where we are. What happens to the place happens to us.

Making Plans & Having Love

(Or is it the other way around?)

Opening I:

Yesterday was Valentine's Day. And there's this expectation that I, as a single girl, should call in sick, watch Beaches and Steel Magnolias, and eat a pint of New York Super Fudge Chunk. Nobody mentions Valentine's Day around you when you're single, the way no one talks about wedding plans with the recently divorced: they're not sure if doing so will result in a news item referencing them as "collateral damage."

But I'm not anti-V-Day. I agree with the idea that it's overcommercialized (what holiday isn't?), but I'm completely in on a holiday celebrating love--if anything, I think we just limit it too much. Because I had the best Valentine's Day ever yesterday, without a romantic interest in sight. Some similarly single friends suggested we get together and throw a party, and it was awesome: we wore old prom/bridesmaid dresses, brought food and flowers and chocolates to share, decorated the CRAP out of Anna's dining room, and had a hilarious evening of awesome. There was no moaning or bitterness, no man-bashing or whining. I've rarely fallen asleep feeling so totally loved and blessed. I have love right here and right now, regardless of the whereabouts of my future husband. Huge love and thanks to my beautiful friends Anna, Esther, Holly, Sarah, and Lauren. :)

Opening II:

"If you want to hear God laugh, tell him your plans." I thought this expression was much older, but it's credited to the still-alive Woody Allen, so just kidding. At any rate, I thought of this yesterday morning, and I realized that I really don't like it. I acknowledge Woody was being, well, Woody, but it stuck in my brain enough for me to want to blog about it (so it MUST have gotten jabbed way in there).

I don't think God laughs at us--which is to say, I think there are times when we warrant a holy eye-roll or a bemused smile, and certainly times when He laughs, to coin a phrase, with us, but I don't think our making plans brings out the critic in Him. He has plans for us (Jeremiah 29:10-14), and His thoughts and plans have more depth, then ours (Isaiah 55:9), but I don't think that causes Him to see our plans as laughable. I need to find what work this is from, but I've heard that C.S. Lewis describes the relationship as a detail of shepherds watching sheep: sheep will settle for whatever water they come to, however unsuitable or polluted it might be. And while, to a sheep, the shepherd is dragging him away from perfectly good water, the shepherd knows that the shallow puddle is nothing compared to the springs on the other side of the hill. The reaction isn't laughter, but a sense of applied direction and at times, urgency. God isn't saying our plans our terrible; they're just not enough to satisfy Him or, in the long run, ourselves.

Cue Seamless Conclusion:

I made a little present for each of the girls last night, involving a couple verses from Isaiah and Jeremiah: "I [the LORD] made you, and I will not forget you" (Is. 44:21) "With unfailing love I have drawn you to myself" (Jer. 31:3). In making the presents, I had to stamp out those words nine times, and each time it pounded deeper into me. The Channy Translation would go something like this: "I am the LORD of all things, not the least of which is you, Chandra, and every little detail that makes you. And while, yes, I have full knowledge and understanding and compassion over your dreams and plans and hopes for a husband, that is not, in any way, the scope of my plans for you. I dreamed you up and gave you the capacity for dreaming. I made you, and set in your heart the desire to make a life. And I have not forgotten you, or any pieces of you. I don't intend to. You are loved to extremes that you cannot understand, so trust me when I say, with the compassion and love of a Father: I HAVE THIS. I have you. There is nothing you know that is outside of my jurisdiction and my control. So take all of you, and rest in Me."


We agreed last night that we need to do this more often than once a year. The idea of Valentine's Day is not to cram all demonstrations of love into one day to free up the other 364, but to purposefully set aside time and opportunity to enjoy and appreciate and speak and do--to put life to our dreams and love to our plans.

The Therapy of Doing

This wasn't the blog post I was toying with writing, but it's on my mind NOW, and I have time NOW, and so I am going with it! (Two blog posts in as many days. Try to maintain your seat.)

I'm a natural homebody--I've never been the sort who liked to go "out," whatever that entailed: in high school, the mall; in college, the clubs; in my twenties, the bars. I enjoy spending time with people, but I prefer small groups to large, and the standard bar scene brings out the old lady in me ("Why is the music so loud?!" "Could that woman's skit be any shorter?! JEEPERS CREEPERS!").

And now that I live alone again, I spend a good deal of time on my couch, reading or watching movies (or blogging, ha ha). I It's just the sort of person I am: snuggled up with a book and a beverage and a candle (a fire would be preferred, but without a fireplace, my landlord might object to that part) are my ideal evening, weeknight or weekend. I love to entertain, but if we're talking day-in, day-out behavior, that's me.

But I was noticing in the last several days that I sometimes mistake that preternatural leaning for idleness. I get this expectation that I have free time, therefore I should bask in it and do nothing. And while there is an absolute need for rest, I think there's a reason for the biblical (and, at one time, cultural) concept of one day of rest for every six of work. Because excess rest is addictive, and potentially as problematic as too little.

I've been noticing this because, coming out of the Christmas season, I have had, perhaps, a glut of rest. I just had a week of vacation in late November, and so was not necessarily desperate for time off again so soon, but I had a four-day weekend last week and a three-day weekend this week, and meanwhile a few of my normal responsibilities have been back-burnered during the holidays, so I've had extra time after work, too. But I got sick of sitting around, and sick quickly. I started feeling like a Neanderthal, slugging around, knuckles dragging the carpet. So I started doing stuff, mostly out of boredom--and then noticed that the more I did--whether it was cleaning and making meals for the week, or working on my brother and sister-in-law's long-overdue Christmas present, or hanging the photos on the wall (3 months after moving--that's a record by a long shot)--the better I felt.

I hope this isn't inspiring you to throw things at your computer--I promise, in a couple weeks I'll be manic again, as usual, and then I won't recognize this over-rested version of myself as human, either--but stick with me for a minute. I don't think we're wired for nothing. As much as we're told that absolute bliss is sitting on a beach somewhere far away from obligations and responsibilities, I don't think we would do well in that environment for long. A little rest, a little vacation, a little downtime? Absolutely. But a lifestyle of it? I think we were wired for something better than that, something more connected and messy and disorganized. Humanity comes to mind.

For most of this weekend, I could have sat on my couch and watched The Two Towers and all the making-of featurettes that come with it. And I probably would have felt like death warmed over afterwards, like a slugging Neanderthal. But instead, I got out: I volunteered my time, I spent time talking with friends who needed an outlet, I got things done around the house, I walked all over my town to and from errands. And now I'm tired and achy and want to curl up in a ball, but I feel good.

Don't mistake this for How Awesome Am I talk--I'm just saying, 7 days of rest and I've figured something out. I'm sure I'll need to figure it all out again in a month or two, but for now, I'm feeling very pleased with myself and with what God's shown me about how he made me today.

That's it.

New Promise in the Land of Unknowns

Part of my reason for maintaining a blog--why most people would just keep a journal, but somehow the potential posterity keeps me (slightly) more accountable--is to be able to look back and see where I've come from, what I thought and felt, and what pretty words I came up with to describe it. And some months ago, I wrote the following:

I am what seems to be a dying breed: the truly, contentedly single. God sets the desires of my heart, and He intends to give them to me in divine timing, unfolding a plan of the most complex, beautiful, perfect design. Whatever it is, I'm confident it will blow my mind, knock the wind out of me, and drop me to my knees.


Well, dang. Who is that chick, and has she written a book or something? (Hint: no.) I do believe that I was in that place in September, but it's just not where I'm batting from these days. I elect not to blame the holidays, thought they play into it--I've just been in a funk. If all the cards are on the table, I'm sick of waiting. What's the holdup? I'm done. Ready for my man. Let's do this. And before I even apologize for whining, I'll say that I caught myself inadvertently giving myself some excellent, convicting advice yesterday. I was catching a friend up on an ongoing saga, and I was paraphrasing advice that I had given to a friend. Both he and I are dealing with similar issues, on different scales: Living life while a God-given promise goes unfulfilled. (We'll save the details of that for another post--just go with me for now.)  

In the various parables of Jesus, the only case (that I can think of) where waiting is acceptable is when it's in reference to God--waiting for the return of Christ, for the coming of the Kingdom--and even then, we're not to be ONLY waiting. Back to back (Matthew 25), Jesus tells two stories: one about virgins waiting for a bridegroom, the other about servants left with money in their master's absence. Taken together, the point Jesus makes is simple: be ready, be waiting, be prepared--but don't just sit and expect showing up to be enough. 

(Sidebar: In rereading the parable of the ten virgins just now, something struck me: five were foolish and five were wise, but, "The bridegroom was a long time in coming, and they all became drowsy and fell asleep" [v. 5, emphasis mine]. Without reading into that too much, I'm going to deduce that even the wise are allowed to get tired of waiting.)

I have a promise, if for nothing else, that God will take care of me and meets my "needs"--physical, emotional, spiritual. But sometimes the bridegroom is later than we expected. At best, we fall asleep; more often, I'm pacing in the dark, getting madder by the minute.


Every year about this time, two things happen simultaneously in my brain: I get mystified and fed up with talk of "this is the year" and resolutions and promises, and I end up, through subliminal whatevers, making these little discoveries about myself that shift the ways in which I want to live. It's not a New Year's thing, it's an understanding that I am being made new, I am on the edge of a new future every day, whether it's January or August. But I guess the corporate mania of the new reminds me of what is always true.


How do you live in the shadow of promises unfulfilled? How do you deal with the worry--the threat--that you've grossly misunderstood something, that you didn't get a divine memo, that you'll look a fool? I don't know, but I've got some good pointers:


"'You are my witnesses,' declares the Lord, 'and my servant who I have chosen, so that you may know and believe me... Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I will make a pathway through the wilderness. I will create rivers in the dry wasteland.'" - Isaiah 43: 10, 18-19


"'This vision is for a future time. It describes the end, and it will be fulfilled. If it seems slow in coming, wait patiently, for it will surely take place. It will not be delayed.'"  - Habakkuk 2:3