Through a Glass, Darkly

I have never been to Texas, so pretty much everything I know about it comes from watching Friday Night Lights. In short: it seems like a nice place with some pretty cute boys. Does that about cover it? There are a lot of jokes about how seriously people from Texas take being from Texas, but I have to admit to you that I am pretty serious about being from North Carolina. You can ask some of my friends who moved away whether I still give them a hard time about abandoning our fair state, and they will tell you that the answer is yes. (Susan? Can I get an amen?) I got this from my mom, who was also raised in this land of tobacco, red clay, and college basketball. Most of what my brother and I did as children centered around our extended family, and what I learned from them was to love God and love the land and people around us. There was something beautiful about every season: the fireworks of leaves in the fall, the mild winters and wonder of occasional snow days, the daffodils and dogwoods in springtime. But summer is when I really learned what it means to love North Carolina. Our hot summer days fade into muggy nights as the edge of the yard is dotted with fireflies. We drink sweet tea in mason jars and pick corn in grandma’s garden, shucking it on the back porch. We snap beans in front of the TV, lounge inside reading novels in front of the air conditioner, and beg to go to the pool. There is a chance of thunderstorms every day, but it hardly ever happens. And we eat tomatoes fresh from the garden, anyone’s garden, because everyone has extras.

It is hard to narrow it down, but tomatoes might just be my favorite part of summer. I refuse to eat those ugly pale ones that are all you can get in the grocery store in the winter. Tomatoes mean BLTs and canning and fat slices on hamburgers. They taste like heat and sunshine and afternoons at grandma’s house.

When Tanya Davis opened the show we saw on PEI, her first song was focused on the beauty she sees and loves around the Island. The line I quoted in the title of this post stood out to me: You have to stay in a place through all the seasons to appreciate everything that it is. I think PEI is a wonderful place to visit, but she is right: I only know a part of it. On the way back to our B&B, I told Mike, “The way that she feels about PEI is how I feel about North Carolina.” Perhaps it was one reason I loved her songs so much: I recognize myself in those words, in that rootedness. I love all four seasons here, even the things that seem to drive other people crazy. It is where I am from and it is a part of me as much as my family. It took me a long time to realize that everyone doesn’t feel this way.

On Prince Edward Island, I noticed that the tomatoes on our salads were, frankly, not very good. Possibly it is not quite tomato season there yet. Or maybe it doesn’t ever get hot enough for them to have a real tomato season, not like we do. It was disappointing. They had many other delicious foods, but I thought from time to time about all those tomatoes that I was missing back home, the juice running down your arm as you take a bite of your sandwich. I saw my mom on Saturday, and she brought me a bag of tomatoes from my grandma’s garden (and some from my great-uncle as well). I realized how glad I am to be home.

Title quote from “Potatoes” by Tanya Davis. Click here to listen to it.

Thanks to Claire, Kelly, and Sarah for inspiring me to think about home.

He sat hunched up on a low, yellow, wooden bench, holding the tip of his nose between two curved fingers in a way that he had. His blond hair was a little too shaggy, and a lock fell across his forehead and over one eye. “I’m a window cleaner,” he said.

“A window cleaner and a musician?”

“No ‘and.’ Music is my window cleaning. If I weren’t so sick of it, I’d quote the Bible. You know that bit. Through a glass darkly. That’s how people see. It’s as though nobody was out in the world. You know what I mean? We’re all shut up in rooms. Everybody. And nobody can ever get in to anybody else’s room. That’s because we’ve got bodies. And the only way we can have contact with other people is through the windows in our rooms. You get what I mean? And some people have more windows than others. And everybody’s windows are dirty. So there have to be window cleaners. I’m one. At least maybe I will be one someday. That’s what I want to be.”

“Oh.”

“The trouble is that my own windows need cleaning.”

“Do they?”

“Sometimes I read things and I can see out better. Usually it’s music (you must play for me). Or a great actress. Or a painting. Usually I just get drunk, so I can forget I’m locked up all by myself in a room and it’s foggy outside . . .” -Madeleine L’Engle, The Small Rain

The summer races by, already the first week of July. Full of, mostly, nothing. I have read and napped, watched soccer and Friday Night Lights, waged war against fruit flies and made chicken salad. Already I have wasted too much time on things that might have been or things that might come to pass instead of focusing on what it means to be here and now.

I am a list-maker, a recipe-follower. I like clean, straight lines and well-defined boundaries. But those are not necessarily things that help me include other people in my life, not if they aren’t on my list of things to do: return the email, make the telephone call, take the time. It is hard to remember this when work is stressful or I’m not sleeping well or it’s just plain cold and rainy outside, but the phone calls and the coffee and the actual conversations are things that make the here and now better. I am comfortable getting lost in a book or a great song. It is easier to hide behind the pages of a novel or notes of music. It is especially easy to hide behind written words that I can control.

I think I need help seeing answers, why things work out the way that they do. So that I can tally up all the columns and make it all turn out right. But I should know better: Sometimes we get answers, sometimes things make sense, sometimes we learn from our experiences. But often, we are simply left with our questions, to decide whether we really mean what we say about faith being the evidence of things unseen.

I would do better to spend my time seeing other people, letting them be complicated and laughing with them. To get lost in a rambling conversation over dinner and maybe a glass of wine.

What do you do to keep your windows clean?

When I came home from work last Monday, this is what my yard looked like.

My church celebrates things like anniversaries and graduations and “important” birthdays by putting flamingos in yards. It’s a Baptist church, so there’s a committee that takes care of it. And apparently the committee deemed my award to be worthy of the flamingos. Which was especially exciting, because Mike and I had not yet had a flamingo-worthy birthday or anniversary. It was our first time being flamingoed. Or, as Brandi says, flocked.

While I was taking these pictures, a family pulled into the parking lot across the street. I didn’t hear what was said to start the conversation, but as they were walking towards the pool, the little girl turned to her dad and said, “I don’t know. I guess she just really likes flamingos.” And even though I am extremely opposed to tacky Christmas decorations (in my own yard, though I enjoy the tackiness of others), I did really, really like the flamingos. I liked what they meant: the excitement of other people celebrating with me. That has been the nicest most unexpected part of this whole thing. If all you focus on is the prize, you might miss a great deal of fun along the way.

I thought about walking over to the parking lot and telling her why I got the flamingos, but instead, I decided to let her believe that I just really like them.