Contemplating September 2020

Early fall days can be like the hot flashes of a temperamental old person—crusty, cantankerous, and unpredictable. September hiccups from summer to autumn like a car whose gears are not properly engaged. One moment it is furnace hot with humidity dripping from the sky and the next I’m grabbing a winter coat.

It doesn’t help that my husband and I change venues. Mid-spring until late September usually has us ensconced in our Oregon lake cottage then we journey to Kentucky with an overloaded car and laughter. This year we left the west earlier than usual in order to watch grandkids while our son-in-law and daughter wandered through Kentucky hiking trails and relaxed.

Oregon sweltered on September 1st. We wound through the McKenzie Pass, a favorite drive, had our picnic lunch in Sisters, enjoyed ice cream, and gathered fabric bits for a quilt before heading toward Bend. It was a beautiful day of sunlight with a mild breeze.

Lightning struck the tinder-dry forests and set them ablaze as we ventured east. Smoke plumes in Wyoming darkened the skies with dirt-brown clouds. The terrifying fires colored our thoughts as we read the news of decimated small Oregon towns hugging the edges of the rivers and forests.

Fires burn throughout our land. Man-made fires that leave carnage in their wake seem to be all around. Where is my heart in this summer of unrest? Is it still and listening to reason’s voice of love?

Summer’s flight
Dogwood leaves rust
While days shorten
In the meager autumn sunlight.
Shed grace on our sorrows
Lord,
As what we love
Becomes dust
In winds of change.

Hard Rain

When lakes fill
and June roses bloom,
gray days
etch my thoughts.

Where is summer?

Has it fled as
grass kneels
at the onslaught
from hard rain?

Or is summer’s
warm breath
hiding
amid the sorrow
of anguish filled days?

Our son, his wife, and five children have repatriated to the U.S. from Kenya. It took four tries. Four sets of itinerary kept them adjusting, repacking, and waiting. And grace bathed them as the rains of uncertainty fell around them.

This is a season when a torrent of emotion sweeps across our landscape. The hard rains of change can fill us with gratitude and, like water overflowing vessels, that grace can bring sustenance as dry days desiccate the land. Too much water can also cause flooding, uproot, and destroy. So, I’m examining my heart as news deluges the internet. Where do I put my trust? Am I allowing the news to steal my joy and destroy what God has built in my life?

Or, do I look to the hills where God has placed His army or as some interpret, where the enemy stands in full battle array. Where does my help come from? Psalm 121. From Him. He is my sustainer, my fortress, my hope. So, a new story rises from the uncertainty and turmoil.

Perhaps it is a story of our time in Thailand during the Vietnam war, a time and place I’ve been reluctant to reexamine. Maybe it will be Josephine in the D.B. Burns series. As she prepares for marriage, facing the pain of her single parent life and the advantages of her independence, Josephine may conclude to continue life alone. But, I’m in the midst of my fictional account of Rebecca Boone’s life. Do these times echo hers where she fled Indian attacks, the British army, and endured long separations from her explorer husband?

The list could go on and on. The emotions wound up in trauma and seeking the place of healing reminds me of a wonderful book I’m reading by Kim Meeder. Encountering Our Wild God. Her devotional book is breathing reason into my days as she helps me examine my heart and look to Him for peace, healing, and divine protection.

Origins

Blame it on my father, this compulsion to pin words to a page. As a child I hear him typing away in his attic office, creating magic with rhyme.
People laughed at Dad’s humor, repeated his lines or embraced them like long lost friends. Dad blessed others with words of affirmation and encouragement scrawled on whatever was handy. He only resorted to his Remington typewriter when the words were distilled enough to merit fiddling with keys.
The syncopation of words was the soundtrack of my childhood. Dad was a poet and musician at heart. Earning a salary was another matter.
Do you have memories of written words floating through your childhood?
Perhaps your mother read to you as you snuggled, or you father read Shakespeare at the dinner table as mine did.

Carrying the magic of language into my writing life is a useful tool. The sound of words fitting together is why I still read aloud. I cuddle with words. But now, instead of Thurber or Dickens who graced my early years, I also read my own writing. Hearing them helps me edit and groom my thoughts. Poetry, a short story, or the two thousand words a day I added on my newest novel, has me reciting as light fades to shadows.
And I have a willing accomplice. My stalwart husband who laughs at the appropriate times and raises a sculpted eyebrow for a misplaced modifier.

Boundaries

Boundaries intrigue me. In Kentucky, stone fences built by settlers that designated the edges of land ownership still line the serpentine roads. The stacked limestone walls are climbable. You can tunnel under them or walk through the gates. But they continue to keep out predators and confine the livestock. And a family and its neighbors know what they possessed.
Personal limits, placed to keep ourselves confined or others away from our presence challenge me. Why, I ask. Is it fear? Or, is it a sign of ownership? Perhaps love of the familiar and the peace it brings is why I and others restrict access to our hearts.
Personally, I like challenges. Peering down a steep slope with two skinny boards attached to my boots made me smile in the past. A race driving course equipped me with insight and assurance when I drove on icy Michigan roads. Living as a minority in Asia or Africa, packing a bag to last for a year didn’t faze me. However, discovering I shut emotional doors that God wants to pry open stops me flat.

As I analyze my feelings and responses, they are translated into prose. WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW is written in capital letters in my mind. Consequently, I create characters with well entrenched boundaries that are challenged by circumstances as well as by others. In the D.B. Burns mystery series, heroine Delilah Burns Morgan faces rebuilding her life after her husband dies, then juggling the attentions of the man her husband wished her to consider marrying. In my novella, Happy Christmas, Miss Lawrence, circumstances alter Alexandra Lawrence’s journey home. Can she trust strangers to protect her in a foreign country and still maintain her peace?

Boundaries, I have a few. When I write down my emotional fences, I see them more clearly. Occasionally Jesus limited access to his heart by withdrawing to spend time with His Father. It seems the better way.
Luke 5:16, Luke 22:41, Matthew 26:39, 42.

January Newsletter

Please find my January Newsletter at the link below.

 

https://mailchi.mp/a7a8a2fe351f/jeanettemariemirichauthor

Trip over a Ladybug..

Fizzling Thoughts…

The Courtship of Harry’s Wife

Steamboat Slough

“To everything there is a season, a time to every purpose under heaven…A time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted.” Ecclesiastes 3:1-2 “There is no new thing under the sun,” says the preacher. Ecclesiastes 1:9
STEAMBOAT SLOUGH

Like Octopus tentacles heading in every direction, the sloughs and bayous of the Sacramento Delta bisect the land. An otherworldly place of ancient lore and pioneer spirit where water snakes through rich farm soil. We take the sinuous curves of the road in search of Snug Harbor.
There are stories here to be excavated like the miners churned over the earth in the mountains. But I do not have time to dig into the minds of my companions. We are here on a retreat of medical and pharmacy students. Tailings of worn out boats to the dilapidated barns reveal the land has been well used. A place of contrasts, where at one bend of the road the bottom soil seems dry and desiccated then the tarmac curves and wineries appear with rose bushes decorating the ends of grape rows like a flower on a Derby hat. The pears have been harvested but a few hang like Christmas ornaments from the stretching branches.
The sweetness of ripe grapes and pears perfumes the air with the delicate touch of a wise vintner. Brown rows of freshly turned soil wait the farmer’s hand. Planting may never come. The water is held hostage by people who have never turned the soil, who studied farming at an obscure university where sweat equity is throwing a ball through a hoop.
It is a familiar battle in the west. Water rights are mixed into a poisonous drink where peace is destroyed. Computer savvy politicians with men from Southern California and men who rise with the sun are the combatants. Those blessed to see creation at dawn and feed their family with their produce are tongue tied by the lawyers in power. As roads are squeezed into one lane by ‘repairs’, ferry’s halted, and bridges ‘under inspection and closed’, people lose hope.
The sun glints on the waves.
Salmon hide in the overhanging willows.
In a place where water laps the tree shrouded banks,
Souls are restored.
It is worth protecting,
This place of yesterday.

His Tail Wagged…