Justice Ministry

New to the blogroll, over there to your right: Justice Ministry. Highly, highly recommended. I just found out about this website about an hour ago. I hear these sermons every week and I think, "I wish I had a photographic memory so I could transcribe these and put them online for other people to enjoy." Lo and behold, here they are after all!

Start here for a taste: "The Unbearable Lack of Loopholes."

This is what keeps my batteries charged throughout the week. This is why I don't curl up in a corner and cry. This is what keeps me sane and gives me hope.

And that's good news.

I'm much more a night person than a morning person. I can stay up all night if I feel like it, but waking up before 7:00 a.m., even if I get plenty of sleep, is anathema to me. Oh, I do my best, and I always make it to the bus on time, but I love sleeping in on my days off.

I have today and tomorrow off, and what do I do first thing this morning? Bounce out of bed at 6:30 a.m., of course, just after my husband left. I was so excited to have four days off in a row! After weeks of maniacal frenzy at work, finally I would have two days entirely to myself, and I wanted them to be as long as possible. As I got dressed I sketched out a quick outline of the day: go for a long walk, drink some coffee, and sit down at the computer to write.

I didn't stick to the schedule completely, but I did indeed go for a walk. Discovery Park is across the canal and not too far, but I'd never ventured to find my way over there on foot before. It was a foggy, chilly morning, and still quiet at 7:30 a.m. when I set out. It only took me about a half hour to get to the North Parking Lot of Discovery Park; I can't believe I've lived in this apartment for a year without trying out that route before.

I hiked up to the Daybreak Star Indian Cultural Center to look out over Puget Sound as the fog cleared. We just acquired a digital camera, and I'm still trying to figure out how to use it to take good pictures. I took the ones below from the top of the bluff, anyway. The first obvious problem is that I can't seem to make my horizons straight. Kind of a problem when looking at the ocean, eh? We'll see how much better I can get in the days ahead.

Blackberry bramble over Puget Sound

Shilshole Marina through the fog

Dandelion in the meadow

Grass in the field

Sun breaking through the fog

Flower at Hiram M. Chittenden Locks

Creation

I made something tonight.

I put a couple of frozen chicken breasts into a pot and filled it about a third of the way with water. I chopped broccoli, celery, onion, and potatoes, adding them to the water bit by bit. I vigorously shook parsley and bay leaves into the bubbling mix. A few hearty dashes of salt and pepper, a half-cup or so of milk, and a quick stream of marsala cooking wine, just because I was curious what it would do. I let it simmer together for a while, then threw in a couple of handfuls of stir fry noodles.

Oh, it was good. We both ate a bowlful before sitting back with groaning bellies. There's a big container of it left over, too, which will make a fine little lunch to reheat tomorrow.

We've been so lax at cooking for ourselves lately. After being so good at alternating nights and cooking for each other, we got out of the habit over the summer, especially during the frenzied weeks before the wedding. Then there was that stretch where we mostly existed on ramen noodles for the last week or two of each month to make the dollars last without resorting to the credit card. And as hot as it was here this summer, neither of us really wanted to heat up the house to cook anyway.

When we once again gained two incomes this fall, it became so easy to continue our laziness and eat out. Or order pizza. Very shortsighted of us, we agreed, and pledged to be more responsible. Then we lost the special events coordinator at work just a month and a half before our one huge special event, and I ended up working 60+ hours a week to help out. That was also not good for our cooking schedule. Lots of Taco del Mar, those weeks.

Now autumn is cooling into winter, and the warmth of the oven is welcome in our apartment. I stir my cobbled-together chicken soup and glow with pride. (Pride and the heat of the stovetop, I suppose.) My husband has been sick, and we are both hungry, but I--I have created soup. And it is good.

Of course, some people might say soupmakers must create ex nihilo, so they will deny that I really had anything to do with the appearance of the soup on our table. I am, instead, a temptation to doubt in the divine providence of the soup--a lie of Satan leading witless souls to stray from the true origins of the soup.

Still, the soup was very good.

Last Leaves

"She makes me feel like a little kid," my brother said last Sunday as he walked into church with our mother.

He was three years old when I finished reading Lord of the Rings. My sister and I trotted through the field and the woods behind our house, describing our beautiful imaginary horses and lopping off weeds with our stick-swords. I called myself "Abner" and my sister called herself "Al." Abner and Al were Robin Hood-style warriors, defending the powerless against the depradations of the wicked. When he wanted to play, we called him "Angellor" to continue the alliteration, and the three of us wielded sticks against invisible enemies all year.

It was two winters later when we dressed up in Nana's old clothes, pulling her faded dresses over our grubby jeans and sweatshirts, and he begged until we gave him a dress to wear, too. Then the three of us preened together in our chilly bedroom, twirled and danced, pitched our voices an octave higher to sound like grown-up ladies.

That was the winter we moved. Our parents spent a week scrubbing dog shit out of the new house before we could move in. We spent the week with Grandma and Grandpa; they spent the week shampooing dog shit out of carpets, cleaning spiders and mouse droppings out of closets, and patching holes in the water-stained ceiling. "It's a better school district," they said while they scrubbed. "We're only five minutes from town here," they reminded each other when they lay down aching into bed at night. "Everything will be easier now," they told themselves.

But that house was still too small for their submerged emotions. The alcohol was gone, but that just gave anger and depression more space to sprawl out in, and they started taking their arguments outside where there was room to bellow. My sister and I heard him crying, and we crept down the hallway through the kitchen to our brother's room. We sat on his bed and tried to calm him down. We sang "Jesus Loves Me" and "This Little Light of Mine. When the fight outside filtered into his bedroom anyway, we sang louder, doing the hand motions.

This little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine.
Ths little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine, let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.
Hide it under a bushel? No! I'm gonna let it shine.
Hide it under a bushel? No! I'm gonna let it shine, let it shine, let it shine, let it shine...

He turned twelve just before I left for college. That year I had to write a paper either defending or questioning the GPA system. I attacked it, writing about my brother's ability to teach himself computer skills in his spare time from the time he was ten years old. I argued that the grading system did nothing to accurately gauge his intelligence, but only to measure his ability to complete rote assignments and memorize facts for tests--tasks he performed poorly. Of course, it wasn't my professor who needed convincing: it was my father, who had taken low grades as proof of my brother's "stupidity" and heaped scorn on him every chance he got.

He was nineteen last summer when he informed me that if I wasn't a Christian, he shouldn't be talking to me because I might corrupt his integrity. "I gotta keep my witness pure," he said. "And if you can't agree with that, I shouldn't be talking to you and letting you make me doubt things.

"I gotta keep my witness pure," he repeated.

As they walked into church together last Sunday, he announced to my mother, "She makes me feel like a little kid, and I just don't want to talk to her anymore."