What to love about July
It is August, and I see people talking about going back to school, and saying things like, “as summer draws to a close…” or, “what I’ve learned this summer…”
And I am not ready for this yet. As slow and uneventful as these months have been, dripping with humidity and the drone of cicadas, my insides seize up a little as I think of them being over.
I am still swimming in July.
In the mornings, I have taken to rising early, where my time is my own. I make coffee, fill my mug to the brim, and settle into a spot by the window in the guest room. I read, procrastinate, pick at my fingernails, think about writing, try to write, bemoan what I have written, and sometimes eek out several hundred words (I am encouraged only when I read of other writers who do much of the same).
Around 7:00, footsteps begin to patter on the stairs. It is usually Sadie, who has been getting up to run before the heat becomes unbearable (it is still unbearable), and has enlisted a couple friends to join her. Margot pops her head in the room to tell me Zoë is awake. I get her up and take her downstairs, where she turns on all her charms for the girls as they stretch and talk softly in the living room.
The girls head out, and one by one, the boys file in. They are supposed to be up by 8:30, and most mornings they make it in time. Mercifully, they have found ways to fill their days, making large Farmer Boy plates of eggs for breakfast, doing home workouts, studying for the SAT and filling out college applications, and playing as much basketball as two boys on their own can play.
I try to clean. Margot asks to play UNO. Quinn comes in sweaty and lays dripping across the couch. I change the laundry, I get groceries and try to think of what in the samhill to make for dinner. Salad and bread. Bread and salad. It’s the only thing that ever comes to mind.
Josh has been home, but also away. He has had work related situations to deal with that have taken him to other cities for a few days each week. When he is gone, I order ice cream and we make extra cookies. We watch movies in the evening, and I marvel at the age differences gathered, and how they chide each other, and sometimes say sweet, unexpected things. I talk on the phone with Josh and tell him how one child is driving me out of my mind, and how another made me laugh, and another frustrated me, and then how they talked together over dinner and made me smile.
There is nothing, not one remarkable or enchanting thing that has happened this summer in the way of events. I am looking at what is before me with frank and earnest eyes, and calling it like it is. And yet remarkably, the unremarkable, shimmers. I will tell you how.
Margot has asked for a memory project, and so far she has mostly not regretted this. When the older kids were younger, I gave them memory work in the summers—The Gettysburg address, Psalm 23, Scripture passages or “I Have A Dream.” We have videos of their high squeaky voices, their hilarious facial expressions, their stupendous achievements over those summers, and Margot was feeling I think, a little left out.
So she and I are working on 1 Corinthians 13. It’s funny what memorization can do to you. At first, I thought maybe this passage was too cliché—being the most used words on love the whole world over, besides maybe “roses are red…” But, shocker, the slow and concentrated time running these words over my tongue has started to work its way down, burrowing under some crusty areas with a searchlight. Memorizing the love passage is another way that the familiar, the commonplace, shimmers with its own kind of radiance.
I’ve been surprised by the glowing pulse of goodness that has grown out of these words and these very unassuming days. There is no special merit to them, nothing that we’ve done or piously observed that has wrought this goodness. I guess for this reason alone, I stand back a little in awe. The fact that I can appreciate what from the outside seems so lackluster, gives me pause.
I listened to an interview with Kate DeCamillo, where she shared a response she gave to the question of how we tell the truth about the world in stories for children. It’s a beautiful interview that I loved on many levels. In her answer she points to the example of E.B. White.
“[He] loved the world,” she says. “And in loving the world, he told the truth about it — its sorrow, its heartbreak, its devastating beauty. He trusted his readers enough to tell them the truth, and with that truth came comfort and a feeling that we were not alone.”
You must love the world. Then tell the truth. I think about this when I look at the kids gathered haphazardly in my living room, the mess that always follows, the hazy light outside the window and the smell of the stinking canal that wafts in on the wettest days.
Love is patient, and kind, in a world that screams both suffering and beauty, both difficult and delightful days. Love looks at the world, the people in it, and does not delight in evil, but rejoices with the truth. Love takes stock of itself and those around them, and does not envy, or boast, or seek itself. Love stays put, allows itself to be constrained-- by time, or circumstance, or place, or God above, or the needs of man below. Love always looks at the world with trust, hope, belief, and a determination to never give up.
I don’t look at the world with this kind of love. Dallas Willard writes that we often read Paul’s famed passage on love the same way we read the Sermon on the Mount, as a list of things we ought to be doing. When in fact, we need this Love given to us as much as anything.
I take this as a sign of hope: that I, who do not naturally look at the world with eyes of love, is at times able to do so. That when I pray, however feebly, for thy kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven, my prayers are heard. That slowly, love—alongside all the hard and not-so-great—grows here.
What I’m pulling Off the Shelf:
This article about a stunning real-life example of civility getting flesh and bones. Her story comes away with the same premise I claim above, and has a way better plot line.
My daughter tried to read a book by Elisabeth Elliot last year, and after a few pages told me she “didn’t like her.” I was crushed. I knew EE had so much to offer, but I couldn’t force it. A few days ago, she picked up the biography I’ve been reading for our book club, and fell in love. “I was so wrong, mom,” she said. And I think that’s true for most of us.
A Circle of Quiet, by Madeleine L’Engle.
For writers, my new favorite newsletter. It’s brilliant. He’s my favorite.
Listening to The Dutch House. Some resonant themes, and my first time reading Ann Patchett.