Naturally, I thought of words.

“Effusion,” I thought to myself. “This is an ‘effusion’ of light.” The stand of trees just east of my house was cast in the beginnings of day. The yet invisible sun had brought the light up, so to speak, in the way the lights come up in a theater at intermission or with a dimmer switch in one’s dining room. It wasn’t bright outside; it wasn’t sunny. It was a filling of light.

But “effuse” and “effusion” were not the words I was looking for. I know, because I checked in with Merriam-Webster, that powerhouse of all things Words. And I discovered, in the fog of my morning brain or my (recently) traveling-too-much brain, or in my all-of-the-marketing-and-none-of-the-writing brain, that I was wrong.

To “effuse” does indeed mean “to flow out,” and the growing light to the east was a kind of flowing, I suppose. The light filled the spaces between the black tree trunks as in so much pouring, which is a definition of “effuse” (“to pour out, as a liquid”).

But it wasn’t quite right.

Why? Because “effuse” and “effusion” are more than this. They are words marked by more— as in Too Much. See Merriam-Webster’s second definition: “to make a great or excessive display of enthusiasm.”

It’s the “excessive” bit here that misfits. And if that seems untrue, we must check the synonyms for “effuse,” which are as follows: gush, fuss, rave, rhapsodize. And the best of them: drool, slobber.

I know, I know. These words are synonyms for the second definition, that “excessive display of enthusiasm.” But we can get the gist of a word more fully when we consider those second (and third) definitions. And certainly we all know what it’s like when one gushes one’s enthusiasm, when one raves. Is that a right sense of “effusion” for the beginnings of a sunrise? For the beginning of my sunrise, today? “Effuse,” “effusive,” “effusion”: these are words leaning beyond abundance, toward excess. Toward– if you will– muchness.

What we had outside my window at 7 AM wasn’t excessive in the slightest. It was quieter than that.

By 7:30, a glow had begun, the gray giving way to something warmer. The sun was certainly now visible somewhere along the horizon, but not yet through my stand of trees. What I had instead was a lifting fog tinged in yellow, and blackened trunks easing toward gray. Light slipping into spaces that, only moments ago, were dark.

“Diffusion,” I thought to myself. That was the word. “Diffuse,” “diffusion.” And naturally I returned to Merriam-Webster, because I like to go there whenever the smallest need suggests itself.

The word seemed, at first, to work: “spread out over a large space, not concentrated.”

What we had outside my window was decidedly spread out. It was everywhere, in fact. The light that moments before was only a gray cast in the sky was now touching everything. The leaves, still patiently hanging on even in the latter half of November, were beginning to show their colors: yellow, pale green, copper and rust.

I considered again my word: “diffuse,” and decided to look at the secondary definitions.

“Diffuse: being at once verbose and ill-organized; not concentrated or localized.”

No, this wasn’t the right word at all. Because while the growing light was decidedly circuitous (a synonym of “diffuse” and perhaps here expressing the light’s capacity for movement around and between the trunks and slender articulations of branch, stem, and leaf), it was certainly not rambling, not long-winded, if you will. Not wandering into logorrhea (“excessive and often incoherent wordiness”), which is specifically a word about speech and words but which implies a lack of focus or organization. Inattention to detail.

What we had outside my window was specific. It was coming on with what could be called deliberation. And it was very attentive to detail.

The sun itself was now coming through in hazy lines through the trees, landing here and there on trunks and leaves. Sometimes it held a cluster of leaves hanging in the sunlight, their colors glowing while around them the woods were in shadow. And sometimes it was a single leaf fully imbued with light as if set on fire. For awhile, a solitary maple leaf close to me was incandescent. It was bright yellow in the sun, and its stem–attached almost invisibly to its shadowed branch–shone red.

This was when I gave up consulting the dictionary. I stood at the window and watched the light call things to life, as with its many hands it moved through the trees, a mother tenderly waking her children into the day.

The right word, of course, is “suffuse,” something you and Merriam-Webster could have told me, no doubt, at the very beginning of this post. To suffuse is to “spread over or fill,” and so it was with the light through the little woods in my backyard. This morning I watched it flush and fill, endue and imbue this small patch of world.

I watched it happen: steep and infuse. “As with a liquid,” says Merriam-Webster. Or “as with joy,” I say.

As with life.

The post November Morning appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

And it is. Suddenly. Our tree is still up, some decorations still out, but Everett is right. Everyone is back to work or school, and yesterday my parents went on their way. So now–for real and for true–we seemed to have turned the page to January.

And yet, one street away from us, neighbors have pumpkins on their front steps: three of the standard orange and one white and squat.

I get it. I absolutely do. For me, 2018 flew by, and the months between the autumn and winter holidays were like something out of L’Engle’s tesseract: for all I know, someone took the corner of October first and bent it right into December and voila! Christmas is over and Everett’s birthday, too, and we’ve celebrated the New Year to boot. Spit spot! (That’s Mary Poppins).

As we drove past the pumpkin neighbors, Bill (who will be taking down our outdoor Christmas decorations this afternoon) explained it to me. “We don’t get any practice for this,” he said. “Between October and December we have so much to decorate for, but for the rest of the year, no one cares.” He’s right. You can have anything–or nothing–decorating your front steps the rest of the year. But come September it’s pumpkins or nothing, and within weeks, pumpkins are all wrong.

Not that anyone’s judging.

I’m certainly not. I feel like the last three months of the year are a bit of a scramble for lots of reasons. First of all, I am not a good plan-ahead gal. I know lots of people who do their Christmas shopping year round, people who write out menus and buy ingredients in November (because they’re on sale) for things they’ll bake the next month. I have nothing but admiration for them.

But (and despite being a mother for over twenty years), I feel like I’m just beginning to learn that Christmas and the other holidays are actually annual events, and I have no excuse but to be better prepared. At the very least, I would be wise to spread the shopping out over the last several months of the year.

The truth is more fundamental, though: I’m just not a special events kind of person. That isn’t to say I don’t love them: I do. But event planning is not my thing on lots of levels. I thrive in the everyday, in the routine and normalcy that give me room to think, and in the slower rhythms that allow for emotional quiet. Those are the spaces that allow me to write.

Boring. So boring.

I know.

So here we are in January, and Everett may be sad about it, but I’m not. I’ll take the new calendar, all blank squares and black lines. I’ll take the swept front steps, too. And I’ll take (yes, please) the empty trees, their trunks and branches limned in sunlight, and the sound the wind makes as it rushes through them.

My grandmother taught me to love the empty trees. “When they’ve lost their leaves,” she would say, “we can see their shapes.”

There’s much to be said for the shape of a tree. And there’s much to be said for clear eyes and clean views and, yes, fresh beginnings.

Welcome, January. I’ll take your openness and your emptiness: all of that quiet possibility.

The post Turning the Page appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

Our backyard maples are skeletal now. It happened in that sudden way that means I haven’t been paying attention.

I know they flushed to gold about two weeks ago. Emma called me to the window, and we stared at them together for a minute. They can seem incandescent in those early yellow days, like we don’t really need to turn the lights on inside at dusk.

I may have seen a leaf or two take a turn downward. There was that day I worked at the kitchen table and watched so many drifting free. Some of them sailed, some turned in tight circles. One I watched fall and catch itself on a lower branch.

And now today these trees are mostly empty.

***

Today, too, is word of loss. 48 dead in the California Camp Fire. This was the news that woke me this morning on my radio alarm.

On Sunday during our worship service, phone alarms from around the congregation reminded Bill and me of the alarm we too had received that morning: another Amber alert. A child taken, and a parent–unknown to us–inconsolable.

And last night, news analysis about pressure potentially brought to bear on Saudi Arabia: the chance that the kingdom could relieve the crisis of famine in Yemen.

***

I don’t begin to know how to pray for these things–and prayer seems ineffectual. But I can do nothing about the forest fire. I am powerless for the stolen child. Yemen’s distress grieves me–but also, for now, anyway–I cannot help.

***

I think He saw the leaves fall. Sees them fall. Saw with me the one cut loose then drift to resting on a lower branch.

So too He says He sees the sparrow–that small and unconsidered life. During the life of Christ on earth, two sparrows made the cheapest meal. A solid source of protein for less than an hour’s wage.

If He knows the death of the sparrow, how much more the life of the one who must eat it? Child. Woman. Man. Person. Image of God.

***

So I do pray for Yemen. For California. For the stolen child and her mother. I hold them up to him–fist full of sparrows. Lord, have mercy.

***

“Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father.” Matthew 10: 29

“Once God has spoken; twice have I heard this: that power belongs to God, and that to you, O Lord, belongs steadfast love.” Psalm 62: 11

The post Fist Full of Sparrows appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

They stand at some distance from the building, at least one hundred yards away, and during the lecture on self-editing a manuscript, I watched these trees. They were huge. Their branches were many. And all of these branches–those fine, pliable, long willow branches moving in the wind–were yellow: the beginnings of leaves.

My mother says that willows are the first to get their leaves in the spring and, in the fall, are the last ones to lose them.

***

Heading home from Michigan on Saturday, we drove through West Virginia and saw that spring had come to the woods.

The trees themselves were still empty. The mountains all around us were like heads with crew-cuts, I said: their trees stood straight and bare as sticks, as bare as close-cropped hair. Between them we could see the forest floor exposed, like so much scalp.

But spring is a todder: it starts knee-high. The green creeps along the forest floor, appearing first in shrubs and bushes.

At home, we had that stage weeks ago, and then the trees sprouted the pinks and incandescences of seed and flower. Over the four days we were gone, I expected this would change. Once it starts, it seems to me– and no matter how many times winter comes banging back into the room– the green of spring is unstoppable: It will come. It is coming. It’s here.

***

I don’t like change, and I see this fact as flaw. It’s an evolutionary disaster, really: failure to adapt.

But it isn’t that I don’t adapt. It’s that, when I see the need coming, I simply don’t want to.

***

At home now, from the breakfast room window, I watch again the way the young maple leaves open like so many hands. The beech trees that line the trail, that retreat into the woods, hold their furled parchment leaves close all winter–and then suddenly they shed them. Beech trees stand naked for a breath, for a day, and then they are bursting with green.

Walking the dog, I stop to pull a new-greened branch toward me and gently touch one leaf. It is thin and pale or deeply green. And it is fabric-soft, like wet paper, like infant skin, like a fine layer of tissue torn from the roof of your mouth.

***

I have watched many springs make their entrance. I am never tired of it. When the seeds and flowers and green start to come, it’s like I can’t tear my eyes away. I’m distracted by the green everywhere along the side of the road, compelled by the growing green outside my bedroom window.

When my daughter-in-law and I departed for our four-day trip, I regretted that I would miss some of the approach of green.

***

There is the change that blind-sides and devastates, the change that means grief. No one wants that kind of change–and while we have known that type before, this is not what I’m talking about.

I’m talking about the kind of change that means growth and life and that still and nonetheless, I so often do not want. We have had much of that kind of change around here lately with yet more to come, and all of it has been very good.

***

I wonder if I watch the oncoming green because I’m hoping for something new in it, something I’ve never noticed before. On Monday I discovered that the newborn leaves of the pin-oak are pink and even a pale magenta– only on their edges, and only when they are very, very new.

But I like what is familiar in it, too, of course. The maple leaves, as I said, opening like hands, and then the wind comes along and moves them, and I stand there watching them longer than is reasonable because it is just so beautiful.

The post Opening Like Hands 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.

Putting a book together is interesting and exhilarating. It is sufficiently difficult and complex that it engages all your intelligence. It is life at its most free. 

I started in earnest on a new book today.

It wasn’t one I’ve been meaning to write. For some time now, the list of what I’ve been meaning to write has been the same: a next novel (working title, Church + Main, named for a building project those local to Durham might recognize); a non-fiction children’s book (which has been in process For Some Time Now and shouldn’t take all that long once I set my mind to it (famous last words)); and a work of non-fiction for grown-ups, a quasi-historical effort that tells the story my extraordinary Uncle Bob and, in so doing, also the story of my father’s growing up–which is a fascinating story in and of itself. I am still going to write all of these.

But the book I started in earnest today is none of the above.

No. This book was born the morning after Thanksgiving while I was sitting with my husband in our living room. We were enjoying our coffee and talking with real gratitude about the goodness of God in our lives.

And also the things that have been difficult.

Your freedom as a writer is not freedom of expression in the sense of wild blurting; you may not let rip. It is life at its most free, if you are fortunate enough to be able to try it, because you select your materials, invent your task, and pace yourself.

Later that afternoon while I was walking the dog, the ideas for this book–stemming from that conversation–would not keep quiet in my brain, and I when I got home I told Bill: I’m going to write a book about that.

And he said: Good.

Fast forward some weeks and here we are, with several pages of notes that came all in a rush and then piecemeal for some time afterward. All I did for several hours this morning was to organize these ideas, to figure out how and where they went together and so create a framework for a book.

Shortly, I will type the ideas into a kind of outline (as the grid situation I’ve got for myself won’t do for others) and send them off to a pastor friend who has agreed to give them a look.

And then we’re off to the keyboard, where this skeleton of ideas will gain ligament and sinew, muscle and skin.

It’s no big deal, right? I’ve done this before. Writing, these days, is my job.

The obverse of this freedom, of course, is that your work is so meaningless, so fully for yourself alone, and so worthless to the world, that no one except you cares whether you do it well, or ever.

But for a moment there at the beginning, with my pens waiting, the notebook open and the laptop, some source books within reach, I felt it again: the doubt that, it seems, must come with any creative writing endeavor.

Should this be done? And can I do it?

Can I? 

There’s only one way to find out.

Every morning you climb several flights of stairs, enter your study, open the French doors, and slide your desk and chair out into the middle of the air. The desk and chair float thirty feet from the ground, between the crowns of maple trees…. Birds fly under your chair. In spring, when the leaves open in the maples’ crowns, your view stops in the treetops just beyond the desk; yellow warblers hiss and whisper on the high twigs, and catch flies. Get to work. Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair. 

***

This post comes to you with gratitude to the amazing Annie Dillard, from whose The Writing Life the italicized passages come.

The post New for a New Year appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

He is before all things

You can’t know–when waking at the gray cat’s paw to a dark sky–how the light will come through the trees at noon.

Other things come first: the sliced turkey laid just so on the bread, carrots and cherry tomatoes, the mandarin, the note on the napkin.

Coffee.

He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.

The very bad traffic at the light.

In the car-line, Emma’s friend waved at me while I stared blindly out my sunglasses. Then he pulled his hoodie over his flume of hair and kept walking.

Meanwhile, news was of bombings in Aleppo and the child mortality rate in North Carolina, of strategies toward peace in Syria and the horrors of opioid addiction. Of forest fires in the South and a new presidency.

Of four-year-old Susie in the UK who called the emergency hotline and saved her mother’s life.

In Him all things hold together.

But last night you played board games and ate brownies and enjoyed the first fireplace fire of the season, and today you sipped coffee and talked with a new friend about books and guilt and the portrayal of guilt in books

and you realize a thing you are just beginning to know, which is that guilt is like grief, that guilt is, in fact, a kind of grief. And as grief, it won’t go away. It can be denied or pretended against. It can be shoved into a corner or hidden neatly with compassion and the magnanimous gesture

but It Will Out.

He is before all things

And you say to your new friend what you know is true: that there are no easy answers. That even though you believe absolutely in an Answer, that answer isn’t easy.

If it were easy, it couldn’t possibly be the answer.

But in Him all things hold together.

It’s on the way home that you see how the yellow leaves filter the sun like lace inflamed; how the scattering of leaves pointed like pins rolls like a flume in the wake of an SUV; how air and light and color are caught and impossibly suspended together around you; how the loosened maple leaf, drawn down by its stem, inscribes circles on the air.

For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross. 

Colossians 1: 19-20

(Amendment made with gratitude to Lynne, who understands so well.)

The post All Things Hold Together appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

It hasn’t always looked like this. I don’t think we wrote on it–ever–until Emma was home-schooled in the 7th grade. That’s when she helped me see that this window would make an excellent substitute for a white board. And so, throughout her three years of home-school, this window occasionally bore math equations, sentence diagrams, and conjugations of Spanish verbs.

In fact, the entire right side of the window is still covered in verb conjugations (leer, vender, escribir, recibir), some residual practice after her instruction back in May.

Why is it still there, you ask? Well, maybe because I loved home-schooling her, and there’s a part of me that’s sad I’m not doing so anymore, and I’m just not ready to erase it.

And also, cleaning that window is kind of a pain, and maybe I’m lazy, or maybe I’m just doing other things.

Older still is the text on the left side of the window. I don’t remember when that got there, but I think it was also sometime this spring. The five of us were eating dinner, and somehow one of us conceived of an idea for what we thought would be a very funny movie, and the next thing you know, we were creating a trailer for said film. We thought we were so hilarious and clever that we felt the urgency to write it all down.

So what you’ve got on the left is a list of ten shots, not necessarily in sequence, that would comprise our movie trailer, and I don’t want to erase it because it’s hilarious and a conversation piece and a memory of a fun evening.

Also, Will wrote it, and soon he won’t be living here anymore.

At the very top of the window is a line from Everett: “Espanol es mi FAVORITA ……Calcitines.” Not exactly correct spelling. Not perfect grammar. But it is very funny (“Spanish is my favorite… socks”). His spelling includes the tilda over the “n,” and, again, he wrote it–maybe a year ago. So I’m not terribly interested in erasing that, either.

The latest addition, there in the pink at the bottom of the left-hand side, also written in Will’s hand, is some to-do’s for Bill for Will’s upcoming wedding. I think we’ve checked all the items off by now, but clearly I haven’t erased it yet.

It’s a good window.

Except.

As you might imagine, the scrawl we have written here makes it tricky to see out of. Depending on how the light hits it, it’s less a window and more a whiteboard, and in that regard it is more a record of our family than it is any kind of lens onto the outside world.

Which is fine. It’s our window, our breakfast room. And we have other windows in here. I am under no obligation to clean it. No one has asked me to. And when I’ve been working in the backyard–at other times, with other text scrawled across the glass–sometimes strangers have stopped and asked me what it says and why it’s like that.

I’m always happy to tell them.

But when is a window not–also–a metaphor?

Here is our view, colored by our humor, our labor, the things we focus on. It is, in a very real way, a record of what matters to us.

Beyond the glass, the neighbors walk by with their dogs or their strollers. The leaves change, twist, fall. A woodpecker lands in the upper branches of a maple. And a resident neighbor, barely visible through the trees, makes use of a leaf-blower.

We would miss so much if we didn’t also see these things–if all we knew was what we chose to study, what we thought was funny, the tasks immediate to our hands.

If we always only saw what we’d written on the glass, then we might as well have no window at all, and replace the whole shebang with a white board that dully reflected ourselves to us.

From whom we learn so little.

In the course of my 47 years, I’ve had some trouble with people. Not everyone, and not always. But I’ve had people who antagonized me or who, no doubt, felt antagonized by me. I’ve been envious or resentful. I’ve felt with absolute certainty that certain people are mean or selfish, hard-hearted, wrong.

And let’s be honest: each of us is each of those things, often more than one of them at any given time, at multiple points in our lives. In our days.

But every time I’ve been helped by the grace of God to look past those perceptions and taken the time to get to know better the person who is offending or hurting me somehow, I’ve always learned that my perceptions weren’t the whole picture; that there was far more to see, appreciate and love than I had been able to imagine; that I had been, in my judgments, Wrong.

Every time there has been more insight, new understanding, greater appreciation and love.

Every. Time.

View from outside my gym on Wednesday, November 9, the day after election day.

Forgive me if I’ve been a little bit preachy here. It’s been a difficult week, and heaven knows there’s been a lot of preaching. And forgive me, too, if the window metaphor wasn’t just a wee bit too obvious.

If need be, chalk it up to my being a writer, to my needing to do some verbal processing.

Thank you, nonetheless and always, for reading.

And now I think I’m going to clean my windows.

The post Window appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

The conversation en route was cheerful. Chatter about driver’s ed, gladness that it was already Thursday, and the painted parking spots in the senior lot. Would they vie for a spot when they are seniors, and Katherine’s someday first car being a motor home. They did not talk about classmates, about other students, although the conversation sometimes goes this way. Because what is high school–around coursework and extracurricular everything– but a time in close proximity to people who are and are not like you, the joys and challenges this brings?

The girls’ school sits in a beautiful block of our city, one whose approach is filled with small and charming houses, sidewalks, tall trees. The school itself is a sprawling, seven-building affair, lined with trees but leaving little room for lawn, except in front of the middle school. On Thursday morning, I saw and heard something I’d never noticed before: that lawn filled with students literally at play.

I was, of course, driving. The car-line and commuter traffic is considerable here. I couldn’t pay close attention to these middle-schoolers on the lawn. But Katherine explained that this was a privilege granted to students who maintained grades to a certain standard, and by evidence of their apparent enjoyment, this seemed a worthwhile reward.

I tried to watch them–impossible–as I drove past. What they were busy at, if everyone was included. Who was engaged, how they were playing. And if anyone–isn’t there always someone who does?–stood or sat alone.

If I look for the source of this impulse, probable causes assert themselves one after the other. When I taught school–so recently, so long ago–I made it my business to like every one of my students. Because we learn better, don’t we?, from the people who earnestly like us for who we are. When I think of my own children at school–long ago or now–and the pain I feel at their potential isolation. When I think of seventh grade and how I hoped to have someone to sit with at lunch. Or when I hear (rare, once?) the story from my father, brilliant but not athletic as a child, who stood against the brick wall of his school during gym class, enduring.

I tried to get a clear look at the middle schoolers, but they moved like leaves blown over the lawn, and I didn’t know any of them.

Thursday morning was beautiful. The morning light slanted in its warm way through the buildings and the trees. I pulled up to the drop-off point, and like a fool I said to the girls as they got out of the car that every one of them is precious. All the students in the school are precious, I said, even the one who makes you cry in math. Because on the second day of school this year a boy in someone’s math class made her cry. We are not naming names.

The girls are not sure they agree with me when it comes to who is precious and who isn’t, and they said so as they hurried out of the car, pulling their backpacks behind them, slamming the doors.

I proceeded, slowly, through the line.

It was September. It is still September, and it’s not fall yet, not quite autumn if you’re going by the calendar that marks the solstice and equinox. When I was teaching and the school calendar all too soon eclipsed what was left of summer, I insisted on the equinox, if only to myself, and that fall didn’t arrive until September 21st.

It goes too fast: this life, these days. Unless you are in high school. Or middle school, which may be worse.

It was still summer on that warm Thursday morning, as I proceeded in the burnished morning light through the car lines. The trees were still green: the decorative pear by the high school’s front entrance, the crepe myrtle in bloom.

Then I drove under the live oaks. A wind gusted, and leaves like amber blades spun down and cut the air. Emma and Katherine were out of the car; they had gone their separate ways, but for a few moments still in the car line, I was driving next to Emma and watching her in my way. She did not look at me, already focused on the day ahead, already at school. But I watched her as I slowly pulled past, saw her beautiful blonde hair and watched as she was enveloped into the school.

The post Morning Drop-Off appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

The field guides were kept in the dining room. Not obtrusively on the kitchen table or counter, but just around the corner, accessible to a quick eye and step.

I can’t say I was raised with them, not exactly. Not any more, anyway, than I was raised with frequent dictionary consultations, which came at home year-round, during dinner and other times. The field guides were a summertime thing, a July thing, a component of that month-every-summer with my grandparents on eastern Long Island. As much a part of summertime life as the pineapple wallpaper in the bedroom.

Mostly, I think, it was the bird and wildflower guides we used, evidence of which is here and there in marker on the pages: my initials, my cousin’s, a sister’s, followed by the date. Apparently Meghan and I both discovered a Lady Slipper on 6/13/76; Meghan alone found the Trailing Arbutus on the same day. Our cousin Nathaniel found Chicory on 9/9/78. His initials appear with the date on page 75, written in ballpoint in my grandmother’s fluent script. And on page 38, where my initials (no date) also appear, my grandmother has noted (9/20/78) the Knotweed, underscoring “Smartweed” in the paragraph description, and adding the words “long bristled” in the margin.With my initials in yellow, I laid claim to discovering Crowned Vetch (p. 59); but I recorded no date, and I wonder if that was a nod at honesty, as that vining weed covered the entirety of my neighbor’s backyard hill in Pittsburgh.

My grandparents knew the names of birds and trees, of wildflowers and mollusks. Such knowledge–and an interest in it–was an extension of who they were. As important as knowing words (and their definitions); as knowing how to use “lay” and “lie” correctly. As knowing all the books of the Bible– in order, of course. It wasn’t that they ever lectured on the value of knowing; they just knew. And if they didn’t, they looked it up.

Hence the field guides on the bookcase in the dining room.

I have inherited these field guides, and Birds: a Guide to the Most Familiar American Birds often lives on (rather than in) our home school cabinet in the breakfast room.  (On December 29, 1960, my grandfather spotted a Bobwhite; on the seventh of that same month, my grandmother saw a Yellow-Shafted Flicker.) This recent winter, Emma and I worked at keeping our window bird feeder filled, hoping that we’d learn something (someone?) new. But mostly it was the regulars: cardinal, chickadee, tufted titmouse, bluejay. Birds my children already know because I taught them, because my grandparents (and parents) taught me.

What is the value in knowing these names? There are few people we are likely to impress. But there is yet something satisfying in it. Something of Adam, maybe, or Aristotle: to name is to know? To love?

When my sons were very young, I called out names of vehicles in answer to their questions (even now, sitting alone and idle at a traffic light, I have to suppress an instinct to share recognition with an otherwise empty car: “Excavator!” “Cherry-picker!”). And regardless of whether they were interested, all three of my children throughout their childhoods were regularly notified of remarkable vegetation we passed: Forsythia! Pyracantha! Wisteria, its purple blossoms festooning the roadside and trees with “grapes.”

But why do I want to know? Why do I want my children to know? With all that is necessary in life, all that is going on both here and abroad, what is the value in alleviating this (small and insignificant) ignorance? They–the world–can get along quite nicely, thank you, amid unknown flora and fauna.

So many people live in cities, in high-rises, surrounded by concrete and macadam. Squirrel. Pigeon…. Pigeon.

Nonetheless, the interest grows. In these recent weeks, the effort to name has taken on new dimension for me. This year, watching the greening of the spring world, I have been attending anew to the trees. While throughout the winter their identity, distinguishable (somewhat?) by dun trunk and branch, seems (to me) unknowable and even irrelevant, their leaves’ emergence exposes them for what they are. Lately I am trying to name them–and the color of their green.

 “Green,” a word that covers but can’t epitomize what I’m seeing. Because the color of the newborn locust leaves is not the same as the crabapple. And the Bradford pears have been, by comparison, a dark green for the better part of the month. Meanwhile, the pendant seeds of the pin oak make that tree’s leaves look almost white. The leaves of the backyard maple are fair. And the distant tulip tree, whose uppermost branches I watch all summer from my kitchen sink window, might be that Crayola spring green I’ve known since I was six.

I find myself reaching for more names. Is there a field guide for green? Celadon, chartreuse, the silver tint of sage. The rich depth of emerald, the blue-bordered jade, the pale and honest shock of peridot. It’s a new and not entirely safe enterprise, this effort to claim names for tree and leaf color together as I’m driving down the road. I think I’ve got it: lime! loden! in what I know is birch; but by the time I name it, the tree and its color are gone, replaced by maple, by white oak, by pin oak, by … oak. All of them turning green.

I imagine I can do a better job staring out my bedroom window. I–and the trees–are standing still now, but it’s nonetheless difficult to bring them into focus. The trees appear in layers, this one and that one closer to or further from the house, strata of leaves in stages of emergence, layers playing tricks on my eyes.

What is it with naming anyway? To identify, to classify, to pin it down in construct of consonant and vowel. The leaves and their color come on without me, they will emerge and expand, and it will matter little or not at all that this afternoon at 3:46 that leaf was the shade of an avocado. The inside of an avocado, to be specific. Guacamole green.

The morning light is coming through the kitchen window above the sink. It catches and hangs on the leaves of the forsythia branch I brought in some weeks ago. The golden yellow blossoms have dropped away, but there is the green of the serrated leaves, all lit up with the sun. This illumination catches my eye and I hang there for a moment, studying blade and vein, the faint polygonal structure of its surface. Words rise and cluster in my brain: photosynthesis, chlorophyll, chloroplast.

And then, just beyond the window sill, the wind hits and the newborn leaves answer. The sun strikes them. They are diaphanous, incandescent, a shifting, glowing mass of light-bearing green. All words leave me, save some chorused by an organ, sung by the congregation-choir of my grandparents’ church there on the eastern end of Long Island, so many summers, every summer of my life.

Let all things their Creator bless
And worship Him in humbleness
O, praise Him
Alleluia!

There is something to naming that opens the eyes. That’s what it is. It’s when we know it that we see it–and not the other way round. Was this what my grandparents knew? Teaching me–so early–to open my eyes. Helping me to see things seen and unseen. To love. And then, so naturally, to praise.

Praise, praise the Father, praise the Son
And praise the Spirit–Three in One!
Oh praise Him!
Alleluia!

Oh, praise Him!

The post The Color Green appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.