Embracing Today

Arriving home from school, I can still hear the creaking sound our old screen door made as it was yanked open and the clamor that followed as we pushed up the narrow back porch steps. Often my brothers and I made a game of leaping two or three steps at a time, shoving each other to win the race to the top. Then all out of breath, with screams of irritation and delight, we burst into the heart of our home where more times than not, my mom would be standing behind the gas stove, cooking. 

For eighteen beautiful springs I lived in one place. A place where cottonwood trees stood like towering castle walls on all sides, creating a leafy canopy overhead. Lilacs formed a hedge just to the south, near a cement duck pond and the sweet aroma of it filled the house in the mornings when all the windows were opened. And the apple tree near the front porch would explode in white blossoms that would drop a carpet of petals surrounding the base, inviting anyone who would dared come close, to sit down and drink in their extravagant beauty.

And we just thought that she liked to be there waiting for us.

Those years, that season of life, imprinted much of what is beautiful, what brings comfort and the things that make me feel most alive.

Things like fresh bread straight from the oven, cookies by the fist full and chocolate anything.

Growing up where I did, people had big appetites and it was okay not to be on a diet. Maybe it was all the clean air and endless places to run, but I never remember hearing talk, about what to eat and what not eat. We just ate and enjoyed it.

We were served crispy fried bacon and eggs for breakfast with toast heaped with loads of real butter. Lunches were often PBJ's and thin potato chips, followed by supper, which was almost always a four course meal of meat, vegetables and potatoes topped with gravy. It wasn't until I left home that I realized gravy was not a food group.

And if that were not enough, if possible, we had an afternoon snack.

We didn't do organized sports, except neighborhood baseball games in the field in front of our home or a bike race to the stream not far from our front door or when we were just a little older, the city swimming pool was only a half mile away.  I think it kept us from being cookie cutter kind of kids that did what everyone else was doing.

I've been inhaling spring, and all that it awakens in me along with this season of life.

Watching every announcement of its arrival with each yellow daffodil and blushing tulip and the entire bird kingdom singing loud before the sun rises outside my window.

And I’m hungry.

I’m hungry for this new season and how spring is arriving on its own timetable.

How green shoots are pushing out of hard places and micro-sized maple leaves have opened up on one huge tree and how the cottonwoods are reluctant to release their buds.

I’m starving for these days that grow longer and warmer nights and the familiar sound of jet-skis with full open throttles on the lake as they surge and soar in the swells. And the smell of campfires and the taste of s'mores, even though I prefer to just eat the chocolate plain or maybe on a single graham cracker.

I still ride a bike and love the feel of wind rushing against my face and the sound of my breathing as moving air fills my lungs and soft clinking sound the gears make when I shift and the chain as it spins against the cogs on the chain wheel. The burn is my muscles is a welcome feeling. It means in this moment I can still move and the body is still responding to being pushed past an office chair.

I want to tuck seed below the surface of tilled ground and wear dirt under my fingers like it’s a fashion statement.

I want to feel the sun on my face and go walking and waving at people I don’t know, but who are glad to be out embracing this season too.

I’m grateful to feel alive and want to grasp where I am, right now, in this season of life without apologies and to stop listening to the banter of the world that I can be more if only I ……

(fill….in…the….blank.)

I want to have deep and hard conversations with those who are brave enough to actually move beyond the thin layer of veneer friendship. 

And I want this to be a season of not be offended by those who are always offended.

In fact I want to be that person who really loves people with abandon, where they are.

I mean really. Love. People.

Because love, or the absence of it, tell the world what we really believe.

I want to hug who I can, with all I have in me and kiss them on the cheek as if it is my last chance. Because I have lived long enough to know... you rarely get a memo when your last chance to love them might be.

I want to pull over to the side of the road, even though I may be late, when the clouds stack just a certain way and the sun makes it all magical and capture just a glimpse of all the beauty of God that is around me.

I have an insatiable appetite for what is real and honest and tangible and uplifting.

Today, I am profoundly moved by what a privilege it is to be an ordinary person, playing a part in the story that God is writing on earth, in this season, right now.

This season is embedded in my pores and senses with certain memories, and tastes, and smells and all these emotions.

And God reveals His glory in and through it all.

When I was young, I pedaled my little bike as fast as I could to reach the next destination, only to throw the bike in tall grass, as I dismounted in a small heap.

I didn't know to take my time arriving.

I didn't fully embrace the world I was blessed to live while I was there.

So today, I want to embrace this right-now-season.

I want to inhale all the sights and sounds and tastes of it, because I think it all matters. All of it. The pain. The joy. The discomfort.

I hope you will slow down today and embrace exactly where you are.

Put your finger on your wrist and be thankful for the throbbing pulse and your one beating beautiful heart and live today like you mean it. 

This season that is arriving will soon enough be gone.  

I’m sharing one of my mom’s go-to recipes.  There are only six ingredients that whip up to make a pan full of chocolate happiness that has been delivered to so many homes, in every kind of season of joy and sorrow.