This Girl's Guide to Gratitude

I have a date with my heating pad tonight. This is my last hurrah at the computer for the day, after a long morning of culling, editing and uploading pictures. This is a big time of year for this shutterbug, and my shoulders and back are no fans of photoshop.

There is an advantage to spending a few hours filling my eyes with the faces and places that have been filling my days. Despite the difficult parts of this year, the tears and questions and wrestlings and griefs, clearly, irrefutably, my life is crowded with blessing, strewn with wonder. Laughter and play and hope and smiles and goofiness brush shoulders with beauty and grace and peace and homemade joys. Bread has risen in the kitchen while the mornings have acquired that particular bright blue snapping air, leaves have turned and boys have grown and outgrown clothes and shoes and even our wildest dreams. I'm rubbing eyes tired from the screen, but dazzled and dazed with my riches, my wealth unearned, unpurchased.

Becuase here's the thing. Because these days have been mine to live and not just document, I know the truth of the matter. Despite all these images I hold up, the Halloween costimes and first days of school, garden blooms and family hikes, they are surrounded by millions more moments lived and not recorded. Like light breaking around the edges of a hand held up to the sun, their glory blooms beyond what I could capture. Though they've stopped me in my tracks with gratitude, my pictures are just crumbs from the banquet I have a seat at every day.

So through whatever medium you use, look at your life. Listen, ear to the ground.

Rustics ReBorn Reborn

I was so happy to learn this morning that our friend Doug is back at work, salvaging old hardware and barn wood to create his wonderful coat racks. He's been on hiatus for several months as he and his wife Rachel welcomed their third son, but his etsy shop is stocked again.

We have known Doug and Rachel for years, celebrated with them at their wedding, and rejoiced with them at each addition to their family. So the coat rack Doug created and gave us as a gift is a treasured piece in our home. It is equally happy holding sun hats and dried lavender, or pinecones and winter coats and hats.

Doug's inventiveness is best expressed in the objects he uses for the hooks themselves. There are old coathooks, to be sure, but also aged doorknobs and casters. Weathered brass, black metal and porcelain and cut glass doorknobs are set off against the weathered grays and browns of the barnwood. I see one even features a candle sconce.

If you're unpacking your jackets for cooler weather and would like to combine utility and art in your home or want a one of a kind gift for a loved one who appreciates pieces of the past and recycling in its purest form, pay a visit to Rustics ReBorn.

Plenty

It happened Friday night as we slept. Friday had been hot and sunny. Oppressive, even. But while we were sleeping, autumn swept in. Rain and mist, and a chill in the air.

These first days of a new season are a blend of pulse-quickening joy and slight melancholy. A balance of lasts and firsts. The blossoms of summer are clinging to a few stems, but most petals are ragged. The garden has that crumby, wild-eyed look of an over-tired preschooler who badly needs to be tucked into bed. The chimes strung from the eaves no longer hang in a humid stillness, but sing to me as the breeze cools at the end of the day.

Many bloggers have been writing about the move inward, making space for living more inside, and I'm doing it too, even as we savor some of the most glorious weeks given to someone living in the upper South Carolina foothills. I'm preparing, cleaning, reordering bookshelves and drawers, washing all the blankets and hanging them to dance in the brisk wind and be warmed in the midday sun. I'm stocking the cabinets with baking supplies, even as I roast the last tomatoes we'll get from my in-laws' amazing garden, blending them with basil and olive oil, parmesan and cracked pepper-- a bit of summer to tuck in between pizza crust and cheese some frosty family movie night.

I was sleeping in the moment Autumn came, but this year, when I am awake, I want to be really awake, soaking in every golden moment as it passes.

"September fattens on vines.
Roses flake from the wall.
The smoke of harmless fires drifts to my eyes.
This is plenty. This is more than enough."
- Geoffrey Hill, September Song

Autumnal

There is nothing like hearing that you've already been joining in a party and didn't even know it! The delightful Songbirdtiff is hosting a Frugal Fall Decor party, and I've been busy over the last week, "shopping my house, " as Nester says. It is hard to say which is more crowded over the next few weeks, our calendar brimful of good things, or the deductions we're writing in our check register!

I love fall. It is my very favorite season, and I love decorating our home with all its colors, textures and scents. But this year that needed to happen without a trip to Michaels. I bought a huge bunch of bittersweet branches at the farmer's market for $6, and other than that, I've been reusing past decorations and natural elements.

Here's what I've been up to:
1. I took an antique silver tray given by John's late grandmother and added a huge pinecone in the center. I arranged a set of four footed glass bowls from Goodwill on top and filled each of them with some decoartive pods and petals from a bag of potpourrri I'd saved. I love the thick old hotel glass juxtaposed with the dried elements and the intricate carved silver.
2. I hung an amber glass tree ornament in the center of a faux berry wreath in the entryway. It hangs over a barwood shelf and coatrack, given by a friend, so there is again the smooth and shiny with the rough and earthy.
3. Thanks to my sweet mother in law, I have several amber glass and golden pottery pieces. On our mantel a pottery charger plate on a stand is fronted by this pedistal candty dish, filled with more of the potpourri.
4. This amber glass pumpkin is also in the family room on top of a bookcase. Pumpkins are such a happy shape-- I also have a grapevine one and and cream matte ceramic one with a silver stem.
5. I replaced the silk gardenia blossoms I'd alternated with candles on this holder with faux russet pears and small pinecones.

I'm really happy that there is a little touch of autumn in every room in the house. Generally, I went around and tried to replace the cool, light and airy with the warm, textural and earthy. The birdcage on our mantel was emptied of starfish and shells and decoated with a wire strand of berries. Candle holders have been filled with coffee beans and inexpensive pillar candles kept from last year. I don't think I could be happier or our home could feel cozier with lots of purchased things.

I'm looking forward to heading over to Songbirdtiff's and gathering more frugal fall decor ideas. See you there!

Open House

We've had a couple of big family nights out this week: back to back open houses at the boys' schools. We are a pretty "in to stay by supper," slow paced family, so we're all feeling Thursday in our bones and steps and the corners of our sleepy eyes.

But I love Open House. The year is rolling-- almost an eighth of it has zipped on by, and this is our first in-person glimpse into the little worlds our kids inhabit for so many weekday hours. The shiny plans of Back to School night have been tested and worn a bit. Personalities are figuring out how to fit. Desk and cubby and teacher's face are familiar landings. And as we come in, listen and observe, we can color in some of the sketches outlined by homework and weekly folders and sparse snacktime stories at home. We peer at bulletin boards with "get to know me" projects, we chuckle at the details a child shares, we meet wide-eyed little friends.

Something more happens at Open House. Seated in those little chairs, our knees close to our chins, we look up at our kids' teachers and silently ask, "Do you know what it is to me to share him with you? Do you really SEE him? Does he reveal himself to you, or are you still trying keys at the lock?" And with jealousy and hope intermingled, "What will you discover in him that I might be too close to see?"

We've been so blessed. Our eyes have been met by frank and friendly gazes, enthusiasm and confidence. Our children have been fed encouragement and humor and grace. The women and men who have shared their schooldays have seen themselves as part of a journey in our boys' lives, helpers and guides.

So as I've sent them out the door this week, the pictures in my head of their hours at school are a little clearer, and the faces and hearts of those who lead them a bit more in focus. We're well into the dance of this year, sending and receiving these little people, sending them back and forth between pairs of caring hands.

New Leaf Wrap Up: Knowing When to Turn

Thanks for your patience as this little series dribbles to an end. :-) I've been testing my theories in the trenches of a bad cold that made its way through the family on top of the glorious messiness of everyday life, and overall, the new leaves have held up well. We've paused instead of hurrying to the next thing, menus planned have saved dollars in the grocery store and at the drive thru window, the house is fairly clean despite sickness and a bit of neglect since I'd finally gotten it clean, and I've tried to work on receiving and extending grace, even to myself. I've not been doing many new things, but there's a bundle of bittersweet and a grapevine wreath waiting for me.

Fall is a natural season for me to look at the way I do things, to implement new plans and tweak old ways. There's a quickening in me, an increased sense of possibility, the sense of something new. For others, this time may come at new year's or around their birthday.

And I think it is healthy, this throwing open of windows and blowing off the dust. Like the parent who finds that the spare clothes packed in the bottom of the diaper bag are three sizes smaller than what the baby wears now, life creeps up on us. The way we care for our homes, the way we seek to answer the needs of our families, changes and shifts over time, since at their center, our plans and schemes involve changing, growing people.

So I encourage you to do that-- especially if there are areas that nag at you-- habits your family has outgrown, parts of the home or the schedule that aren't working for you as hard as they could. At the end of the day, it is all about living as deeply as we can in each day we're given. It makes sense that some things might need to be made efficient, and others slowed down or eliminated.

But here's the other side-- if areas work for you, let them keep working for you. If you're a successful once a month cook, with a plan and a buddy to enact it with and a binder of family-pleasing recipes, keep doing it! If you are a champion zone-cleaner with a sparkly house, clean those rooms top to bottom! Sometimes the restlessness, the next-new-thing obsession of our culture can even creep into how we set the rhythms of our lives. If we are convinced that the next new idea is always just beyond us, and with it a home and family life that will work well, we will never settle into the actual living.

Maybe the best wisdom in all this is in knowing which leaves need turning, and which to leave alone. You know best your own sweet spot, when your focus can go where your heart pulls it.

Blessings to you as you listen to your life.

Nine Eleven

There is nothing like having children to help you observe the passage of time.

Eight years ago I was holding my ten month old boy in my arms, watching we knew not what unfold on the television screen, and thinking one clear thought, over and over,

"As far as he knows, he will never live in a country where this has not happened."

It felt then as if time was split forever into before this, and after. The chatter and noise of the tenth of September, and the awfully beautiful blue empty skies of the eleventh.

It seems impossible that baby headed off to his third grade class this morning, joined by his little brother. Impossible that so many Septembers have come and gone.

I'll be back next week with some final new leaf thinking, but for this day, overcast and dim here, candles and quiet seem right.