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.

 Martin Buber, I and Thou

On the morning of Everett and Olivia’s wedding, I had to pull Everett’s box out from under my bed.

I have a box for each of my children under there. They contain those things I’ve saved over the years: programs from band and chorus concerts, an essay or two they’ve written. Artwork from school or our kitchen table. Those special papers culled only once in a while from the folders they toted home weekly during grade school.

That morning in Everett’s box I’d hoped to find some photos, but instead I found the camouflage watchband he’d worn daily in fourth grade, and also his Batman suit.

***

The forecast for the wedding was rain. After so little of it that spring, we were promised rain for the entire second half of the week and also the weekend.

Which shouldn’t be a problem, right? They say that rain on a wedding is good luck. But the wedding ceremony was to be in an open field encircled by woods. There were a few refurbished, century-old buildings for the preparations and reception, but the wedding itself would be outside.

I was on my weather app almost hourly that week, mentally shoving the radar report toward Sunday. As far as I was concerned, it could rain buckets on Sunday. It didn’t seem that clear skies –for just a few hours on a May Saturday afternoon– should be too much to hope for.

As it went, the weather looked (potentially) positive: the rain was delayed later and later in the week, with percent-chances on the decrease. We had hope for our Saturday afternoon.

And when it came time for Friday’s rehearsal, all signs of rain–in the sky, not the forecast–had disappeared. The air was warm, the light golden. After dinner, we all spilled out of the reception barn and onto the lawn for cornhole and Frisbee and, as the evening went on, a long and laughing game of hide-and-seek.

***

I suppose some might argue that Friday evening was the time for them to get married. Wedding party and some family were assembled, and here was the weather they had certainly envisioned when, a few months before, Everett and Olivia had discovered this beautiful venue.

But they didn’t get married because of weather, obviously. And the date had been chosen; the guests were invited and planning to come. You don’t just arbitrarily choose a day to get married, do you? We certainly don’t decide to get married based on barometric pressure.

So, how do we decide? Which are the elements that must converge in order to have a wedding? We have happily married friends who did it at the courthouse, pulling obliging strangers from the hallway to serve as witnesses. We have friends who eloped. We have friends who got married in intimate ceremonies with no one invited but their families–and then we joined them to celebrate in a reception the next day.

The date of the wedding–and even the how (the horse-drawn carriage that fetches you to the reception, say; or the destination to a glamorous city)–can’t begin to matter. Not near so much, anyway, as the why. 

***

When Bill and I married, the weather was insignificant: both wedding and reception were indoors. But we remember the weather that day nonetheless. In the morning, I sat in my bathrobe on the deck of the house where I grew up and watched clouds slide fast across a clear sky. The sun and wind continued until late afternoon. Then clouds moved in and we, now married for about six hours, stopped at receptions held at Bill’s father’s and then mother’s homes.

That night after dark it rained and thundered, and we have since commented to each other about it: we’re glad the weather was varied, glad it wasn’t all-day-perfect. If weather on one’s wedding day holds any kind of meaning for what a marriage might be like, then at the very least turbulence seemed honest.

***

The appearance of the Batman suit should not have surprised me. I was digging in Everett’s box, after all. The thing is chock-full of “Everett artifacts,” if you will, the place where I keep most of the treasures pertaining to him.

And I will admit that the Batman suit, which he wore as daily as possible throughout the entire year he was four, was less of a surprise than the watchband. It took me a moment to recall what it was, especially as the watch itself (broken and thrown away, I assume) wasn’t there. I don’t remember where he got the watch, but since its re-discovery on the morning of the wedding, I have noticed it on Everett’s wrist in old photographs. Ah yes, the watch that Everett wore for months during –was it?– fourth grade.

And then one day, presumably, it broke. Or one day he just stopped wearing it. And his mother knew that here was a piece of his life that was precious enough for the keeping. Into the box it went.

As was the watch, the moment of its interment in the box is also lost to memory, as are many of the moments of his fourth grade year. But I have that watchband.

I suppose my keeping it is testament to foolish sentimentality. Or to love. You decide.

***

In any case, the fact is that the watchband only matters because of its wearer, but the wearer himself is not something I can keep, stored in a box (creepily) under a bed. No, the life of the child will progress regardless of whether or not we are paying attention, of whether or not we are storing things in boxes or, as did the mother of Christ with her blessed child, in our hearts.

I have plenty of Everett-moments stored away. There is the time when, age three, he came back inside to invite me to investigate with him an anthill he had discovered in the yard. And the times, younger still, when he would come to me, busy as I was and pregnant with his sister, and say, “I hold you, Mommy,” at which point I would abandon whatever I was doing and hoist him into my arms.

The times he had trouble leaving me to go to school and then the glorious day when he didn’t. The morning I walked with him and my father to the beach and then watched Everett celebrate the water. The evening we picked him up from his first middle school dance. The afternoon I picked him up from his first day of high school. The early morning we sent him off at the airport on his gap year travels and the golden afternoon, six months later, when we welcomed him home again.

But I don’t know exactly the day he knew he loved Olivia, the moment he knew –as once upon a time Bill and I did of each other– that he had found the Someone he wanted to do the good and hard work of marriage with. That’s really not the sort of thing one necessarily tells one’s mother. It’s not something a mother needs to know.

***

An outdoor wedding, we all agreed, is “just so Livy.” This young woman who loves my son also loves sunlight and growing things, bare feet and daisy chains. Of course she should get married outside.

But the weather, as we all know, is something we have yet to control. Despite the extraordinary advances given us by science, the weather vexes and concerns us in ways both small and great. After a week of watching the forecast, Friday’s glorious evening seemed to portend the blessing we’d all be hoping for: Saturday would be beautiful.

Still, did it need to be? With all we’ve been given, did we need also to insist on good weather? Days before the wedding, speaking of exactly this, I said to a friend of my about-to-be daughter-in-law, “I just want her to have what she wants.”

My friend’s response was full of wisdom: “She already does, doesn’t she?”

And Olivia did. I know she would agree. She had the about-to-be husband she had prayed for, the person to do the good and hard work of marriage with.

In that context, good weather on May 11, 2019 would be extra.

***

Bill and I were ridiculously young when we got married, but we knew this much: we wouldn’t always be happy. We wouldn’t always seem to be the best partner for the other. We would sometimes disagree and argue; we would apologize and forgive. We would do the good and hard work of being married to each other, come what may. Like so much weather.

And this is why we’ve been glad that the weather was so varied on our wedding day: because the imagery, if you will, was perfect. We knew the trouble would come, although we didn’t yet know how. And we knew that the trouble is what forges the marriage.

Certainly the good days, the joys and ease of a healthy relationship forge a marriage, too. But it’s those times you struggle through, the fights you resolve, the times you think you might like to walk away but you don’t— that’s when you know that happiness isn’t what keeps you there.

Happiness comes and goes. And comes again. A marriage based on feelings of happiness will disappear like the sun behind a cloud.

In this context, a little rain on a wedding day –if you’re wanting symbolism– is nothing short of a blessing.

***

About an hour before the wedding ceremony, Olivia did a wonderful thing. I’m guessing it’s somewhat commonly done these days, but on my wedding day, I had never heard of it. I wish I had.

Dressed in her gown and ready for the wedding, Olivia met her father Tom in a quiet corner of the field, away from any guests or onlookers. It was her father’s “first-look” at his daughter-now-bride, a moment for the two of them to be together before this momentous change in their lives.

I didn’t have a moment like that with my father. I know I rode with him to the church, that he waited with me and my bridesmaids before the ceremony. And after I sent my precious flower girl ahead of me down the aisle, he turned to me and asked, “How do I look?”

He meant to be funny, and he was, but I was nervous and distracted. And sadly I was unaware of the enormous weight of this moment for him, so I brushed him off. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wished that I had responded differently.

Separated from the busyness of last-minute wedding preparation, Olivia and her father had time to talk together. I didn’t watch it happen, but I’ve seen the photos. I’m sure that both of them treasure the time.

It’s good to make time for moments like these, because so much of life becomes lost in the everyday.

***

The truth is that –on the one hand– it doesn’t matter when you get married. Weather, time-of-day, glamorous location (or not) aside, it’s what happens on the wedding day that matters. And what happens on the wedding day actually occurs before the wedding day itself.

It’s at some point before the wedding day that you decide you’ve found your person. That this person and no other will be the one for you. That you can trust the other to know you at your worst. That this person, above all others, can help you be your best. That they, like you, will fight for the other and, sometimes more importantly, for your marriage.

The decision to that commitment happens some time before your wedding day, I say. Your wedding day is just the moment when you formally declare it to the world.

And that moment matters. Enormously.

***

Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. -Genesis 2:24.

***

At the beginning of their wedding ceremony, Tom stood with Olivia in front of the guests. When Malcolm asked the question (“Who gives this bride?”), Tom’s answer was out of the ordinary. He didn’t just say the traditional, “I do.” Instead he replied, “Her mother and sister and brother and I.”

Their family, like ours, was once a family of five. On May 11, 2019, they simultaneously became a family of four and a family of six.

This is mystery and reality together. It’s difficult and beautiful. And it’s good.

***

On the morning of Everett and Olivia’s wedding, the sky looked like it might conceivably turn blue, but as the day went on, the clouds settled in. It looked like rain, but we continued to hold out hope even when Tina, the wedding organizer, trotted out baskets of umbrellas.

The guests were assembled and we all continued to watch our weather apps, passing along word of percent-chances, this time reckoning them by the minute. The bride and bridesmaids stood at the ready, and it was a question of waiting: should we wait ten minutes? Fifteen? What were our chances to avoid the rain?

Tina asked Olivia, and Olivia said we should begin. The music swelled, we assembled for the procession, and off we went.

We had the darlingest of twin flower girls, radiant bridesmaids, and an utterly beautiful bride. But I will admit to mostly watching the groom that day. It’s an infrequent gift in life to watch your son promise himself to the well-being of another, to declare before God and with his help that he will be committed to her for the rest of his life. To enter– so young, so bold, so humble– into this adventure that his father and I have known: the good and hard work of marriage, the appalling views it affords onto your own selfishness, the apologies and forgiveness that make a life.

And then they were married and the bridal party was off, two by two, behind the husband and wife. There was music and all the laughter and congratulations. We parents and grandparents made our way out, and the guests after us.

Moments later it began to rain.

all photos courtesy Sarah Darnell Photography

The post Like So Much Weather appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

And if you’re going to have a repeat of this, then you Really Don’t want the water to leak beyond the concrete pad underneath the washer and dryer and out to the (newly replaced) carpet of the playroom floor.

But if you do indeed have a repeat of this— or at least the beginnings of a repeat such that you are loathe to run Any Water At All in the house until the plumber comes, and least of all to run the clothes washer or even to Think about running the washer– then what you Really Don’t Want is a little girl with a stomach ailment.

(Truth be told, you don’t Ever want a little girl to have a stomach ailment, but sometimes these things Just Can’t Be Helped).

And when you have such things (as we did last night, a night during which our Darling repeatedly rejected the contents of her stomach and Only Once managed to lose them and simultaneously deposit them in an appropriate receptacle), you find that you have a Great Deal of laundry (suddenly) to do.

But you can’t do it.

And so once again, when Things Like This occur, you find you are wanting a Rachel, who will let you bring All Your Laundry to her house. And there you will proceed to do All Your Laundry, including the sheets and the quilt and the pajamas and the Bunny, who is Most Precious.

After which (oh, Praise!) the plumber will fix the problem and the Healer will fix the stomach and All Shall Be Well.

And it is.

Thanks, Rachel!

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The salesman said that would be fine, but they no longer had them in stock. All they had was this pair, and they were the floor models and, as we could see, the washer had a slight Ding on the front lower panel.

“We don’t mind,” we said. “We’ll take them.” What kind of difference, after all, does a Ding make to the Internal Workings of a clothes washer? The Ding would have no impact on the cleanliness of our clothes. The Ding was superficial, as it were, and We Did Not Care.

Well, the salesman said he would give us a ten percent discount on account of the floor model Ding, and they would be delivered tomorrow.

We left Very Happy, because it had been, already, Two Weeks without a functioning washer or dryer in our home.

Said items were dutifully delivered on Monday, and Bill was home to sign for them, and see them installed, and he turned on the dryer Just To Check.

It sounded, he told me, like there were so many shoes in the drum.

“It sounds,” he told the installers, “like there’s a pair of shoes in there.”

The installers agreed that the dryer, when operating, did indeed sound as though it were drying a pair of shoes. I think it was also noted that There Were No Shoes inside. And then Bill noted, with interest, that the the installers left Without Comment.

Bill called the store.

Ah yes, said the salesman in regard to Bill’s concern. He was very sorry to hear about this Noise, and reminded Bill that our dryer had been the last one in the store. But, he said, we’ll receive a new shipment on Wednesday, and we’ll deliver a new dryer to your home on Thursday.

This was Hopeful News.

And on Monday night, we washed a load of clothes. We figured that we could dry them on the clothes drying rack and that they would be none the worse for the wear.

And we were like children on Christmas morning, we really were, loading our brand new front-loading washing machine. And we put Way Too Much soap in, and were sorry about that, and thought, later, that it was the too much soap that caused our brand new washing machine to leak water All Over The Floor.

I hung the clean clothes on the drying rack and stopped doing laundry.

But on Wednesday, Bill got brave and thought he’d try another load or two. It was, after all, the Error With Soap that had caused the leakage. We still didn’t have a dryer, but its arrival was imminent and we sure could use some more clean clothes.

And this brand new floor model Ding washing machine, which this time was allowed only a Little Bit of soap, leaked and flooded and flooded and leaked All Over The Floor Again.

On Thursday, the installers came and installed the new dryer. Bill explained about the washing machine. The installers left. Bill called the company. They have promised a new washing machine, and it will arrive next Thursday.

Meanwhile, we are stopping the leak with duct tape.

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It was a mercy, in fact, that I discovered them on a Friday, and not earlier, as that would have made a long week Even Longer. And the week that was ahead of me, after this discovery, would be More Than Long Enough. Emma Grace had head lice.

Oh. How Very Awful.

I didn’t know what they were at first. I had never seen them before. This was something that Other People got in Other Schools A Long Time Ago. Not me. And certainly not my daughter.

Of course, it wasn’t as bad as it seemed it would be. First of all, it would seem that she hadn’t picked it up at school. And when I reported it, as was my duty, to Allison in the office so that she could send a letter home to the parents of all of Emma Grace’s classmates, her response was so gracious and so matter-of-fact that the ignominy of this situation began, almost palpably, almost visibly, to diminish right there in the office.

Nonetheless, the ensuing evenings exhausted me. I shampooed her hair and shampooed it and left the shampoo to soak, and rinsed, and then combed and combed and combed through Each And Every Strand of her hair, every evening finding nits so infinitesimally small that I could not even believe I was seeing them.

I exaggerate Not.

Neither do I exaggerate my Exhaustion, and a sense of Growing Despair that, for me, always accompanies exhaustion.

Those were bleak days.

Then they were gone. Praise Be.

And then it was Christmas vacation.

But the next disaster was on its way. Because, as you know if you read this blog regularly and/or are a friend with whom I communicate on a regular basis, days after the new year our sewer pipe vomited forth its contents into our laundry/playroom and we had to spend three nights in a Residence Inn. Yes. And Even Now the playroom is stripped of all its comforts, the dry wall is, in some places, missing, we have only just now finally connected the new washer and dryer, and the washer leaks. But that is a story for another blog.

Now, really, this isn’t so bad either. I mean, it’s getting old– the cold concrete under our feet, the toys displaced to the living room. But still. There is Tremendous Suffering in the world. I have yet to taste Any of it.

Nonetheless. I was just a wee bit unsettled when, having told a colleague about the playroom eruption, she commented, “These things always come in threes.” Yes, I was unsettled because, as I looked about me, all I could see was Two. Lice. Sewage. That’s only two in anyone’s math book.

I am not a superstitious person. I put my faith in the Living God.

But Still.

And then I realized it, even though the realization came late. It came Very Late, considering that Bill had been driving us to and from school all week. You would think I would have realized it when, needing to run an errand during the school day, I was confronted with the fact that I didn’t have a car on campus. Yes. Number Three had been upon us for Days. I was living in Number Three, and I didn’t even know it: The transmission in Bill’s car was out, his car was in the shop, and we were, once again, Making Do.

Phew.

We picked up the car today, and we got the first check from the insurance company so that we can begin making repairs downstairs. And Emma Grace’s hair is Free and Clear.

That wasn’t so bad. No. Not so bad At All.

“Everything is necessary that He sends. Nothing can be necessary that He withholds.”

There is a Great Deal of Comfort in that.

The post In Threes appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

That’s Drama.

And if, under that title, you can get this byline, “Recovering Your Future,” then that’s some reassurance. And it’s also funny. Because then, when your horrified neighbor calls to see What In The World Has Happened, she can comment on the “recovering your future” byline and ask you, “But what happened to your past?”

That’s Humor.

It’s also good, when this happens, to have homemade soup from your mother-in-law on your first night back in your house. Yes, vegetable soup, with cabbage, please. And cornbread. Yum.

That’s Comfort.

And finally, I recommend (in case a disaster like this is looming in your future) that you also get yourself a Rachel. Because if you’ve got one of those, then chances are that you’ll have someplace to take your laundry while you yourself are all day in your Workplace. And you’ll find, at the end of the day, that your laundry is Washed, and Dried, and Folded, and organized in the basket according to the members of the family to whom they belong. And she might even wash your husband’s slippers, and tuck a baggie of Hershey’s kisses in one of them just for Good Measure.

That’s Friendship.

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Remember how we had separate bedrooms? And remember the counter where we pretended to be at a restaurant? And we had two separate bathrooms. And three (3!) televisions!

That was Cool.

Yes, I think that’s what they’ll remember.

I hope they Won’t remember how the house stunk to High Heaven, and how it felt gross to even think about going into the basement. I hope they won’t remember how we started to run short of clean clothes or how– briefly, sometimes– our tempers flared.

Maybe they’ll remember the Moment of the Burst on Friday afternoon, when Everett declared that Something Was Broken downstairs, because he heard all of that rushing water just after someone flushed the toilet.

I’ll remember it: Mom, something’s broken, he said.

Yes, I’ll remember that, and the water seeping under the carpet. I’ll also remember the sigh of relief when Bill came home and inspected the point of the leak. He examined it, and he fixed it (we thought) and That was That.

And so I’ll also remember when, on Sunday, Everett made a second announcement horrifyingly similar to the first, at which point we discovered that it wasn’t so easily repaired as we had thought. No. And this water that was seeping under the carpet, yes, this water that we thought was just water– Just Water– was Not Just Water At All, but rather was all the Dirtiest and Most Vile water in the house. You know the kind: the water that is usually swept away with every flush by every drain and taken off somewhere through something called a sewer system.

That was the water in the basement.

Which is why we we are here– the Residence Inn, night 3.

The children are having a great time.

I’m thinking they might remember the workmen who will have to knock down a wall and rebuild it again after they have finished cleaning and cleaning and cleaning the concrete pad of the basement floor. They will probably remember having new carpet installed and new wall boards repaired, and new tile by the French doors that lead onto the deck.

They won’t remember how their father spent his Sunday: cleaning the Vilest Water out of our basement. They won’t remember it because they didn’t really realize it was happening, playing, as they were, quietly and happily all through a Sunday afternoon. They won’t remember it because their father didn’t make much of it. He just cleaned and cleaned and cleaned and Never Complained Once and never asked for help because he just didn’t want any of us to have to participate in So Very Disgusting a task.

I will remember that.

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