Goin' Down to Mama's

Sunday Morning Serenity

I'm sorry I don't have much time to write this morning. And to my family/Harpersville friends: I'm about to tell you something you CANNOT tell my parents at church this morning—I'll tell them when I get back home so they won't worry. Dave and I are on a rare long vacation, and we're coming home today—in a rental car. Yesterday, we were dead-still at a four-way stop when a young girl in a humongous pickup truck was making a left onto our street and hit the gas too hard on a rainy highway. She lost control and slammed into our car, then spun around and rendered a second car unsafe to drive. But we were so blessed that no one was hurt. Everybody walked away fine. And a local police officer, who realized the difficult situation we were in, got our car towed and drove us back to our rental house, which was a loooooong way from town. (For some reason, he put me in the back seat of the squad car and Dave in the front. I guess I looked like trouble:) So after an early morning taxi ride to the airport to pick up a rental car, we're packing up for the trip home.We called our insurance company's hotline yesterday, but once we had our wits about us, Dave and I both said, "We need to call John." John Wimberly is our amazing insurance agent, who treats us like friends, not clients. So between John, our new police officer friend, and the Good Lord keeping us safe, all will be well:) I hope your Sunday morning is more serene than mine has been!

Sunday Morning Serenity

Have you ever seen a picture of yourself that you didn’t know existed—one taken long ago and long forgotten? My sweet cousin sent me a DVD of her parents’ old home movies—some of them taken in the 70s, when I was a teenager. And there we we all were—my maternal grandmother, “Grandme,” my parents, cousins, aunts, and uncles. I was in those old movies—wearing a red dress I had forgotten about. It had a matching kerchief sort of a thing that tied around my neck. Very 70s:)

I looked at those pictures and thought, “Who is that child?” When you’re young, you don’t realize how fast time is passing or how much you’re learning, experiencing, and changing every second. Then, as you get older, you look back and can’t fathom how much distance there seems to be between then and now.

When I was a teenager and on into my twenties, really, I was eternally restless—always looking ahead to the next thing I was going to do or the next place I wanted to go. Now, what I appreciate most is stillness—rare moments when there’s nothing I have to do and no place I have to go. I can be perfectly content, just sitting on our deck early in the morning and listening to the birds wake up.

Those are the times when I’m most aware of the many ways Dave and I have been blessed. That’s when I’m the most thankful for the divine hand that guides us on our journey, even though we can’t always see it while it’s happening. But when we look back—when we watch our "home movie"—there are all those images of the steps He helped us take.

Sunday Morning Serenity

Yesterday afternoon, I cooked a lot—for me, anyway. I'm mostly a recipe-follower, not a natural cook. Not someone you would expect to find solace in pots and pans. But this has happened twice now. Quite a few years ago, when my grandmother died after a long bout with cancer, I went to my parents' house, where everybody was gathering, and started cooking. I made a vat of spaghetti sauce and cooked a roast. Somewhere along the way, I think I stopped by the grocery store and bought more food to prepare. Yesterday, when I got home from my friend Wanda's funeral, I changed my clothes and broke out the cutting board. This time it was a big skillet of taco filling and enough chicken salad to feed an army that occupied my hands and at least a little part of my mind.

Wanda was one of the first friends I ever made at Southern Living back in the 80s. When we met, I had what she always called my "gypsy hairdo." It's hard to explain what it was like for somebody like me to end up someplace like that back then. For one thing, the company was huge. And it was social. There were a gazillion parties and receptions and openings that I had to attend. And next to all those editors and artists and photographers—people who seemed to have been everywhere and seen everything—I felt like a bumpkin. I had been to Auburn, Baylor, the Florida Panhandle, and Disney World. That was about the extent of my world travels. 

Wanda was one of the kind souls who took it upon themselves to put me at ease, show me the ropes, and assure me that there was no need to feel intimidated because the rest of the staff were just people and they would soon be my friends. She clued me in and built me up.

She also taught me an amazing trick that I still use to this day. It's called "the single mingle." I had gone to her with a lot of hand-wringing over yet another big social event coming up. "I'm just not good at these things," I whined. "I'm an only child!" She got a little gleam in her eye and said:"Here's what you do. You walk into the party and immediately fix yourself a plate of food. Then you wander through the crowd peering around as if you're searching for your group of friends. Nibble on the food as you go. Make a couple of laps like that so that everybody sees you, and then you can go home without ever having to make conversation with total strangers." It absolutely worked. I "single mingled" my way through many a party after that.

One of her many friends posted on Facebook that Wanda had a way of making you believe everything was going to be all right. I can't count the times she did that for me. She was a gifted writer with a wonderful sense of humor, someone who loved to laugh and to show others how to lighten up a little bit and enjoy life. She was my friend, and I'll miss her. But I'm so lucky to have met her.

I'm thinking of her this morning—and of another friend, Missey, who would've celebrated her birthday today. The two of them never met, but they would've been serious trouble together. They would've gotten into all kinds of mischief. I like to think they might run into each other "up yonder."

 

Sunday Morning Serenity

My friend Carole has an expression: "I feel pecked by a hundred chickens."  She's talking about those days when a million distractions seem to get in the way—not one big distraction but a bunch of little insignificant ones: Here a peck, there a peck, look this way, now look that way . . . A whole day can go by without ever getting to what you intended to do.

Yesterday, I started my morning with one BIG distraction that generated lots of little ones—a classic ripple effect.The morning that Dave and I left for our trip, I was tying up some loose ends in the Story Shack and had the front and back doors open. I saw a chipmunk dart in and run behind my printer. After blocking off his return path, I shook and rattled everything he could be hiding behind to shoo him outside. He had vanished. So I hoped he had ducked out while I was looking the other way. Mother and Daddy were coming over that night, so I asked them to check for me. They shook and rattled. No chipmunk. We all concluded that he had made it back out, after indulging in the bowl of Meow Mix I keep in there for the boys.

Well . . . he was still in there. Yesterday was the first time I've opened my office since we left for Florida, and my, oh, my. There was evidence of chipmunk occupation everywhere. Before I could do any writing, I had to sanitize. Started with the vacuum cleaner, then moved on to Lysol and Tylex. Realized the window I had inadvertently left cracked had let in all kinds of moisture, and I had mildew to deal with. One thing led to another (those 100 chickens): scrubbing the floor made me aware of the icky baseboards; wiping down the shelves made me see that all the framed family pics needed a good cleaning; climbing a ladder to dust a display shelf showed me that—wow, 10 out of 12 track lights are blown—when did that happen? And by the way, the windows were dirty, and the printer had needed a new toner cartridge for about a month.

I'm about to start a new creative project that I'm really excited about, so I took the better part of yesterday and just got myself situated. Clean office, old files moved to storage, nothing in there to take me out of that peaceful place my mind needs to get to in order to write fiction. Now that I've "cleaned my house," I can focus on what's important.

In an earlier post, I mentioned Priscilla Shirer's book Fervent, which my friend Mary Allen gave to me. This morning, I ran across a passage in it that speaks to the spiritual equivalent of those 100 chickens:

                Focus minimizes distractions, lowering your risk of being blindsided.
                It keeps you from being preoccupied, from overlooking important
                facts that would've been readily obvious if you'd only
                been paying better attention.

                Focus protects your goals and dreams from being
                consumed in small bites, stolen right out from under
                your nose in twenty-minute segments of compromise.

                And focus is the antenna
                that prayer helps to keep raised and alert . . .

A prayer this morning for focus, for freedom from distractions and the ability to see, all day every day, what's really important.