The holiday season–that busy stretch of weeks between Thanksgiving and the New Year–is often filled with Comings and Goings. Someone traveling somewhere and remaining for a while. Guests. Visitors. We had many. Did you?

Here’s the thing about Comings and Goings: some are more welcome than others. 

We definitely welcomed my parents.

They arrived the day before Christmas Eve and stayed for just over a week. In that window we took walks and ate lots, watched the third season of The Crown and then, hungry for more of England’s royal family, The Queen. We debated politics and theology; listened to Bach and Christmas carols; stayed up late and slept in; made, packaged and delivered Christmas cookies to the neighbors. My father repaired a faulty electrical socket in a bedroom and took lots of pictures. My mother did most of the laundry, cleaned up the kitchen, and played the piano.

It was lovely.

We also welcomed Shanna’s family.

Her parents and two siblings arrived December 20th and left January 2nd. They stayed with Will and Shanna, but we got to see lots of them nonetheless.

We celebrated Christmas Eve with them at Will and Shanna’s house. We celebrated Christmas Day with them at our house. And we celebrated New Year’s Eve together (plus three (most welcome) friends), eating raclette and playing games and finally ringing in 2020 outside at the firepit, where we toasted a new decade and then sang a hymn or two.

We welcomed Bill’s brother Ray, who came to us from Pittsburgh, and also his mother and brother, who live nearby.

All of these were Comings that were, as I said, Most Welcome.

But we also welcomed some Goings.

There was, for starters, the possum on our door step the night before Thanksgiving. Presumably lured by cheeses that cling to empty pizza boxes (stashed en route to the recycling bin), it was captured by my dog when I was heading out the door to borrow corn syrup from my neighbor.

Despite my dog’s having caught it in her teeth (I made her leave it); despite the possum’s proximity to a human’s front door; despite being a wild creature threatened by a dog keenly interested in catching it again, that possum remained. It played dead for hours on our top step, mostly obscured by the pile of empty boxes, but leaving exposed one tight claw and the sharp teeth that circled its open mouth.

We don’t know when it left, but were very pleased that it was gone in the morning.

The thing about Unwelcome Visitors, I’ve found, is that they don’t know when to leave– which was the case with the squirrel that, for a time, inhabited our Christmas tree.

When I awoke a few weeks before Christmas to hear it banging around in our breakfast room, I didn’t know it was a squirrel. I thought it was the cat (our cat doesn’t bang around) or the dog (who was lying on her bed). I certainly didn’t think it would be a wild animal, a squirrel caught in our many-windowed breakfast room. When I came upon it, still blurry with sleep, the squirrel was throwing itself against said windows, trying desperately to get outside.

I called the dog away from the room. And the cat. Then I called my husband. We opened doors and windows (outside it was 30-odd degrees and raining) and did all we could to usher the wild, frightened and somewhat bruised creature out of the house.

So it (logically) ran from breakfast room to living room and hid in the Christmas tree.

The sheriff wanted to carry the tree out and set it free. Durham’s answer (in this instance) to Animal Control, he wore boots and heavy gloves and had Squirrel-in-House Experience. But despite gentle prodding with our broom, the squirrel wouldn’t leave. Yes, it emerged a time or two and raced around, hiding temporarily under the sofa, threatening to go upstairs, and (always) missing the open doors that beckoned it outside. But every time it darted forth, it found its way back to the tree again.

In the end, the tree did not have to be carried out. The kindly sheriff kept at it until–in what was a third or fourth round of mayhem–we assume that it found a door.

We were Very Glad it went.

Yes, we had our share of comings and goings, of both the welcome and unwelcome variety. And we had one other: a Going-and-Coming, a Departure-and-Arrival. But it wasn’t an arrival here. It wasn’t a coming to us. It happened on Christmas Eve, but we didn’t see it.

On Christmas Eve, Emma and her team of nine left Kona, Hawaii for Athens, Greece. As we slept, as we celebrated Christmas, as we enjoyed the quiet Day After, Emma was flying halfway around the world.

She arrived in Athens on December 26th at 5 p.m., and she’ll be there for ten weeks, working with Youth With a Mission to serve refugees. These are people who know Going in ways I’ve never understood it: necessary, frightening, desperate. And their Coming to Greece, too, is likely full of fear. I’m hoping Emma and her friends can bring them some small relief.

We would have loved to have had her home for Christmas, but we’re so glad that she is where she is.

And when she gets home in March, we’ll be overjoyed to welcome her.

All photos by Richard Brewster with the exception of the above, which was sent to us: Emma playing guitar on Mars Hill in Athens.

The post Holiday Visitors appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

Standing in her office, my editor reminded me that writing is a job just as ditch-digging is. The ditch must be dug. Must not also the writing be written?

She is right, of course. The ditch-digger goes to work and digs her ditch; so must the writer go to work and write her pages.

But, I think (my mind swelling with contingencies), must the ditch be dug in all weathers? And are not the graduation of a son/the marriage of another/the departure for six months of the former all grounds for writing’s suspension? What writing wants–I tell myself, I tell her (who is herself a writer and also not present during this rationalization)–what writing wants is level emotional space in which to write. One wants peace and quiet and non-upheaval, all of which (lately) have been difficult to come by.

***

My parents were here for over a week. They came, along with a beloved aunt, for Thanksgiving, and so for a time we were back to our usual number (+1) in this sweet little house.

We went for walks, we played games, we ate great food, we talked. And around the edges my father removed and stored all our window-screens for the winter. He replaced light switches and repaired a broken lamp and rescued two computer chargers that had been almost too thoroughly chewed by a certain rabbit (I’m not naming names). My mother finished my mending (languishing since time out of mind at the foot of my bed) and did all the laundry and cleaned up the kitchen most days before I could get to it myself.

I did not do any writing, and I do not feel bad about that in the least. Neither–if she knew–would my editor.

***

Yesterday’s loneliness was contingent on all of this. Emma had gone back to school, Bill was away, and our beloved guests had gone home. The dog, two cats, and offending rabbit, while present, offered little comfort.

I might have gotten some writing done. Indeed, my days’ contents are contingent on the demands of my work–except that yesterday my car needed repair.

And so for a while yesterday morning, my well-being was entirely contingent on the sanity and tow-truck-driving skill of a boy-man named Seth with a ZZ Top beard on his chin and a three-year-old son at home; and our comfort throughout the thirty minute drive depended on our ability to make decent conversation or for me, on the other hand, to stare out the window or immerse myself in my phone.

***

Everything hinges on everything else. Or, better said, everything hinges on something.

Refrigerator space is contingent on our finishing the leftovers.

A flushing toilet is contingent on good plumbing.

My happiness is contingent on the well-being of a very specific group of others–including my parents, who yesterday and again today are traveling north; and my husband, who yesterday was traveling south; my daughter, who is mere miles away at school; my daughter-in-law, who is gift and delight; and my sons, one of whom is currently residing on a island in the Pacific.

***

Seth earned his commercial driver’s license because another job fell through and he needed work. Currently, he has a class B license, which allows him to drive vehicles weighing 26,001 pounds or heavier. As we pulled onto the highway, we watched the rear wheels of a tractor trailer smoke, stutter, and come to a stop. He explained that the brakes had locked up, and for a time our conversation was of brakes and how they operate, and I told him that I have a real fear of rear-ending someone, so I always keep a gap between me and the car in front of mine.

He said that a tractor-trailer traveling at full speed requires the length of two football fields and then some to come to a complete stop.

This is true, of course, contingent on the weight of whatever it is the tractor-trailer is hauling.

***

So much can change so fast.

***

My mood is often contingent on what I have to do or what I can get done or some strange ratio between the two.

Yesterday my mood was contingent on the departure of my guests, the sudden quiet of my house, and the marks–everywhere–of my parents having been here: the newspaper my dad brought home from McDonald’s. My mother’s Sudoku book. The light coming through all the windows brighter, because my father had removed all the screens.

When they are here, everything I do seems more efficient, because they are so willing to do the difficult or menial things. They leave and the house looks basically the same, but in fact it is much improved.

***

Yesterday I sat at my kitchen table and noticed, for the first time this fall, pale sunlight irradiating the finest limbs of the maple trees that line my backyard–a beauty contingent on the cold and the leaves having fallen, contingent on the earth’s continued jaunt around the sun.

The last time these trees were bare–sometime in March, I think–we were still five people living in this house. But this change doesn’t make me sad as I once feared it would–and that is contingent on wisdom, for which I am grateful.

***

My parents left at 8 a.m., only minutes before Emma left for school, and it wasn’t until some time after they’d left that I realized I’d forgotten to wish them a Happy Anniversary. Yesterday was their 52nd.

We make our own decisions, live our own lives, but yesterday I was thinking that so much of my life is contingent on my parents’ commitment to God and to each other, which for them is, in a way, one and the same thing.

They practice what they’ve always told me: that you’ll find only One consistent in a world of contingencies–and that even this One sometimes only seems consistent because you yourself insist on believing he is.

I think sometimes we want him to leave us a note or send a visitation, but he has other ways. He doesn’t always tell us that he Is so much as he spreads scarred hands wide each morning and brings the sun up.

The sunrise contingent on his goodness, and all goodness contingent on him who is Always Good.

The post Contingencies appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

“Are you related to Robert Louis Stevenson?”

And the second from the mother, who is old enough to be a mother:

“(The Daughter) is reciting her most favorite tomorrow… ‘The Swing.’ I’ve been coaching her to try to recite it without the cadence because I think it loses meaning. Thoughts?”

Thoughts. Immediate: to swings, and how I love to go up in them.

How do you like to go up in a swing/Up in the air so blue? Oh, I do think it the loveliest thing/ever a child can do!

I’m thinking of the time I learned to pump the swing myself. We were visiting my grandmother in Florida, and my older sister and I were taken by the hand by our father and walked rapidly (my father always walks rapidly) down a sidewalk that had, to one side, a tall white fence. Over the top of the fence we could see lemon trees, and my father sang us a song about them as we went.

Lemon tree, very pretty and the lemon flower is sweet. But the fruit of the poor lemon is impossible to eat.

And this was Very Funny, because my father loves lemons.

We arrived at a park, and my father pushed us on the swings, and then he explained how one leans on a swing and pushes one’s legs out and back again. Suddenly I had learned to pump the swing with my legs, and I could swing on my own.

How do you like to go up in a swing, up in the air so blue?

I pushed William on a swing when he was barely old enough to sit upright. Everett, too. And when Emma turned one, we bought her a baby swing for the swing-set in the back yard. I remember her blond hair, so fine and straight, swaying back and forth from its pigtail above her grinning face.

The mother: “I’ve been coaching her to try to recite it without the cadence.” Thoughts?

Yes, to the mornings my children and I sat around our kitchen table eating breakfast and reciting poetry. It was my way of packing in a few elements of school before they had a chance to realize it: a Bible story, a picture study, a poem over pancakes and in our pajamas.

Among the many, we learned Stevenson’s “My Shadow,” “The Wind,” and “The Swing.”

“Are you related to Robert Louis Stevenson?” I think my children wanted to know if they were, too.

Thoughts?

Yes, to grading papers at my desk when teaching high school, typing paragraphs of encouragement about supporting arguments and placing commas inside (INSIDE) the quotation marks, and wishing from time to time that these students had spent a small corner of their childhoods reciting poetry–and many of them had. Because you can teach a person how to shape an argument, how to develop said argument over a series of paragraphs, how to enfold supporting evidence via quote or paraphrase into one’s sentences. But by the time one is in high school, it might be too late or insupportable to teach the value of rhythm, the power of varied sentence length, the priceless weight of emphasis and inflection, the music of our spoken–or written–words.

The mother: “I think it loses its meaning.”

Can it?

Up in the air and over the wall/till I can see so wide/Rivers and trees and cattle and all/Over the countryside.

I can imagine the daughter standing at the corner of the sofa, reciting. Or seated at the table, head bent over her coloring, reciting. UP in the AIR and Over the WALL till I can SEE so WIDE.

What is the rhythm of this poem if not Stevenson swinging himself? Back and forth, back and forth. The daughter may be sitting at the table, colored pencil in hand, but the words she is saying are motion, and they are moving her back and forth with the poet himself, with all children anywhere ever who have sometime swung on a swing.

Till I look down on the garden green/Down on the roof so brown

Stevenson’s poem will lose its meaning only when there are no longer children outside because they’ve all turned to their iPhones, when all the swings sit idle, when the rushing breeze and flying force born of a child’s volition loses all power to answer.

Up in the air I go flying again/Up in the air and down!

“Thoughts?”

Yes. That surely some of the meaning is lost on the daughter, for whom swinging in this way is so close–for now–to her everyday experience. For her, for now, this mother is doing everything right: getting this poem in the child’s head. It’s Stevenson’s cadence that will keep it there, and so she’ll be saying it in her head for years to come.

And someday she‘ll be pushing her little one on the swing and admiring how the breeze pushes that one sweet curl back and forth, and she’ll mindlessly start saying the poem to her curly-headed cherub. And suddenly the poem’s meaning will bring happy tears to her eyes, just because the realization is so sweet, and she’ll know for the first time that her mother gave her that poem–a gift– years ago, and she’s only just opening it now.

“Are you related to Robert Louis Stevenson?”

Yes. We think so. Scotland is small enough. How many Stevensons can there be?

“Mom, are we related to Robert Louis Stevenson?”

Sure. Why not?

The post Two Questions appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

I would imagine, too, that it’s almost universal: that sense of having a deadline, Something Due, and so everything else must wait, or take a back seat to it, anyway.

Of course, deadlines are helpful. Even necessary. I have talked about this before. I have always been grateful for deadlines– but that doesn’t mean I like them.

I find it especially difficult as a mother. Certainly I faced deadlines before I was a mother, and they were troubling (and helpful!) enough back then. But as a mother, the pressure of a deadline takes on side-effects that I don’t much care for. Because right now, my kitchen floor is filthy, and the Entire House wants a good vacuuming, and this morning I caught the dying mint plant only just before it kicked the proverbial bucket: it is now reviving nicely (freshly watered) on the deck. But a few hours’ more neglect and it would have been money (very) poorly spent.

This is not to say that I didn’t (necessarily) have floor-scrubbing, carpet-vacuuming, plant-watering duties before I was a mother. But it is to say that, around the edges of meeting a deadline, I have only enough (also) time to take care of my family– and Nothing Else.

It begins to wear on one, doesn’t it?: the Noticing of all that one must tend to, and the Not Being Able To Get To It. Yet.

But once again we are closing in. Tomorrow evening, in fact, at 11:59, I am Absolutely Committed to sending this New and Improved draft of my novel to my editor– and this will be the first time that anyone at all (other than me) has read the entire thing in full, and then I won’t be (Oh, I am So Glad) alone in this project anymore.

Until then, it is all hovering over the computer for me. Yes, I took Sunday off. But most of Friday and Saturday were spend reading, reading, reading the manuscript. And yesterday it was all about tending to my notes and making those additions, those vital little pieces that must be inserted here and there if the thing as a whole is going to make sense. Today it is more of the same: my head locked in this little story, my mind overtaken by these characters and plot– so that everything else (nearly everything else) must take a backseat.

Focused in this way on this small thing, the rest of the world grows unfamiliar. It weighs on my brain as annoyance, as tedious and distracting obligation. Last night, tired beyond what seemed reasonable, I had to make myself quit the book and go to bed– and read Something Different, just to clear my mind.

We as a family have faced this before: way back when I wrote my Master’s thesis; or when I was writing curriculum; or when, periodically, it was time to grade essays, write report card comments, grade and comment on a new raft of papers. Mom in the throws of some assignment-or-other, working hard against a deadline.

Yes, we are all too familiar with this.

Yesterday it was so bad that I didn’t even take time to exercise– something that is ohsogood for a hard-working brain. I asked Emma and her friend Jewel to walk the dog–which they gladly did, and let her off the leash, and didn’t notice until it was too late that she had rolled in something rotting (“it had maggots!,” they told me), and consequently bathed her in the backyard using Will and Everett’s Old Spice Denali body wash because we are out of dog shampoo. And then for the rest of the evening, the dog smelled like wet dog (yuck) and Denali body wash, which is really quite pleasant.

Emma also brought home to me a fistful of honeysuckle– and I wouldn’t have known but for that bouquet that it is blooming now all along the edges of the woods. It’s in a little vase on the kitchen counter, and it smells wonderful.

I remember my father introducing me to honeysuckle when I was maybe six, discovering where it grew in a hedge up the road from my grandparents’ house on Long Island. He taught my sisters and me how to choose the ripe blossom and pull it off the vine, how to break and then tug so gently at the pedicel and so pull the filaments through. At the base of the filament: treasure! The sweetest drip of honey that we sucked right off the plant.

Later I showed this to my children. It grows so near our house. William was probably two when I showed it to him for the first time; the same was likely true with the others. But they’ve always loved honeysuckle since then, and I distinctly remember one of them (Everett?) instructing me as to the parts of a plant (pistil and stamen, petal and style) when he was (maybe?) in the first grade and learning about the parts of a plant.

You can look them up in the dictionary, you know– these botanical terms. Merriam-Webster is more than happy to oblige the curious with an accompanying drawing, and I went there just now to look up the parts of a blossom because, don’t you know, I can’t
ever remember them.

Which made me think that someone (who?) does the drawings for Merriam-Webster. Someone has that job– a botanist, maybe. And she works against a deadline, perhaps, to get her drawings in on time.

But for me it was an escape: looking up the image, writing this blog post, standing a moment too long at my kitchen counter and inhaling– not wet dog– the smell of the honeysuckle there.

We will get past this deadline, as we have all the deadlines before it.

I walked the dog this morning. A brisk walk that my entire self– mind and body and soul– was so glad for. And in a shady patch down where the creek overflows its banks after rain, I saw a little tree– a dogwood, maybe?– that was all entwined in honeysuckle. The tendrils brooded over the top of the tree, hanging down like a lock of hair, all yellow and white with blossoms.

The post Familiar appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

She is a Very Sweet Cat.

I think rescued animals are often sweet, because they are, by and large, grateful. Minnie was rescued. She had been kicked out of a car (I saw it happen) and into the grey Pennsylvania snow on an equally grey day in January and when we reached the place where the kicking had occurred (we were pedestrians on this grey January day), there she was: small and white and grey against the snow, nose pink and eyes running from some sort of cold. She was Not At All inhibited by the neighbor’s dog (which we were walking), but came running to us immediately, mewling and meowing fit to make you cry.

I picked her up and stuffed her into my coat. We brought her home and fed her on canned dog food (which I kept for the neighbor’s dog, as she was neglected). She began purring Almost Immediately and has kept it going, by and large, Ever Since.

She has tolerated six moves and three children, and never ever scratches unless provoked In The Extreme (which means that she only scratches when pressed into an inescapable position by very persistent and small children). She defines “Scaredy Cat,” and will hide sooner than fight; she is decidedly the undercat in our neighborhood even though, in some of the match-ups, she was here first.

Our children love her.

So today my father posed a question to the children about their cat. What color is she, he wondered. Is she grey with white spots or white with grey spots?

It’s hard to know.

The children debated. Yes, white with grey, I think they concluded. But then they studied her as she stretched in the sunlight. No, she’s grey with white. Because look at that grey on her head, and also on her feet. She’s a grey cat, mostly grey. No, she’s white. Yes, white.

But Emma Grace knew, and she decided to put the entire debate to rest. “She’s a white and grey cat,” she said.

And that was that.

The post Minnie appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

I think they both look so pleased. Don’t you think they look pleased?

Emma Grace is wearing the vest my mother crocheted for her in the car during their drive to our house. She made me one just like it when I was a girl.

My parents were here just a few weeks ago, just for a few days and nights, to help us celebrate Emma’s birthday. Then they were off to the South, visiting more family and friends and enjoying, I’m sure, the warmer weather.

But they are coming back to us soon– at the end of this week. They’ll stay longer this time, and we’ll be on spring break, and we will have a lovely time. I am Really looking forward to this!

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