At Lela S

I was amazed to find this sign with my name on it in the town near my Gramaw's house. We used to eat here after church on Sundays when visiting. The sign said Cattlelacs back then, I guess a play on Cadillac. I never new that my name was hidden in there until yesterday when I noticed all the right letters had fallen off. I think it's empty now.


I don't have anything to post, so I leave you with a few pictures again. This morning's sunrise was the best yet, but I was too wrapped up in it and then my Gramaw getting up to take pictures. They wouldn't have done it justice anyhow. I'm here for about a week longer, I think.

concerts and boots

A week ago, I went to the first concert I've been to in quite a while. It reminded me how wonderful live music can be. Over the Rhine at the Cactus Cafe. Everything about it was wonderful.


In other news, I've been increasing my percentage of being Texan. I've lived here since before kindergarten (and both sides of my family, although very different, are completely Texan), but I had never owned a pair of boots until about a month ago. I had also never cooked a steak until last night when I cooked one for my Grandmother for Valentine's day. There are probably quite a few other things that I need to cross off my list, too. When overseas, people are sometimes surprised that I'm Texan because I lose my accent (which was never too strong to begin with). The other day, someone commented that it must be funny when I speak Chinese with a Texan accent. I told her that I don't usually have much of an accent when I'm overseas because I'm not around too many Texans. She said, "It's funny how it comes back, isn't it?" I guess that means that my Texan accent is back. Maybe it came with the cowboy boots.

two sides of the clothesline

"Observe," said da Vinci, "observe in the streets at twilight, when the day is cloudy, the loveliness and tenderness spread on the faces of men and women."
- found in, you guessed it, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard

I'm here for two more days, then heading back to Austin for a while, to, among other things, go to an Over the Rhine concert. Yay!

the days are a pleasure

In response to a request for pictures, I have a few. Maybe I'll have a chance to grab a few more this week. This one is taken from the pickup on the way here, approaching the caprock.

Sunset coming, through an old tractor window.

Dusk, seen through Gramaw's kitchen window.

Sunrise, reflected in the window of the front porch. This morning the sunrise was really amazing, but I didn't get a chance to enjoy it long enough to get the camera.

"But if I can bear the nights, the days are a pleasure. I walk out; see something, some event that would otherwise have been utterly missed and lost; or something sees me, some enormous power brushes me with its clean wing, and I resound like a beaten bell."
- Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard
(I know I sometimes find so many wonderful quotes in a book that I use them too much, but I can't help but share them! Spending my nights alone on the farm waking up multiple times with Gramaw, I'm identifying with this one particularly right now.)

an excellent January partly cloudy

Today is one of those excellent January partly cloudies in which light chooses an unexpected part of the landscape to trick out in gilt, and then shadow sweeps it away. You know you're alive. You take huge steps, trying to feel the planet's roundness arc between your feet.
- another from Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

I've been staying at my Gramaw's house for a week, helping to take care of her in her last days this side of eternity. She has someone to come out and be with her during the day, so I've been subbing and tutoring some at the school where my Grandad, Dad, Uncle, Aunt, and cousins went to school. I've been doing mostly high school math, which is fun because I get to remember all that math I've forgotten how to do in the past four years of teaching English.

I've always loved coming out here to the cotton farm, mostly because it was when I got to be with my four girl cousins who are more like sisters than cousins. We loved being together so much that they would try to hide from my parents in our car as we left to go back to Abilene. The idea was that they would reveal themselves about halfway home when it would be too late for my parents to drive all the way back. We never really had the courage to make it that far, though. Usually before we got off the dirt roads, one of us would break out in laughter and blow their cover.

Now I still love to come out, to be with family and enjoy the stillness, the cotton fields that go on forever - to the edge of the horizon, at least. From my Gramaw's front porch, you can watch the sunrise every day of the year if you want to and from the back porch, you can watch the sunset. The beauty of West Texas is its simplicity, the nothingness that makes you notice everything. Sometimes I think I could actually see the roundness of the earth as I look out on the horizon.

facing upstream

Live water heals memories. I look up the creek and here it comes, the future, being borne aloft as on a winding succession of laden trays. You may wake and look from the window and breathe the real air, and say, with satisfaction or with longing, "This is it." But if you look up the creek in any weather, your spirit fills, and you are saying, with an exulting rise of the lungs, "Here it comes!"

Here it comes. In the far distance I can see the concrete bridge where the road crosses the creek. Under that bridge and beyond it the water is flat and silent, blued by distance and stilled by depth. It is so much sky, a fallen shred caught in the cleft of banks. But it pours. The channel here is straight as an arrow; grace itself is an archer. Between the dangling wands of bankside willows, beneath the overarching limbs of tulip, walnut, and Osage orange, I see the creek pour down. It spills toward me streaming over a series of sandstone tiers, down, and down, and down. I feel as though I stand at the foot of an infinitely high staircase, down which some exuberant spirit is flinging tennis ball after tennis ball, eternally, and the one thing I want in the world is a tennis ball.

There must be something wrong with a creekside person who, all things being equal, chooses to face downstream.

(from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard)

so grand and subtle...

After talking with one of my still single cousins today, doing my best to remind both of us that God has not forgotten we're on the face of the earth (and in fact lovingly has us in this specific place and circumstance for a reason), I thought more about things that I'm trying to make sense of. I have been trying to make sense of my life more lately, which has resulted in me being less content, more easily misunderstood and less understanding of others, especially of others who are experiencing what I long for.

I think trying to make sense of my life can be a good thing, as long as I'll follow it through to a point where I am okay with not understanding everything. It's just that getting past the (sometimes bitter or angry) point of "why is it like this?" takes some patience. Patience isn't something I've had a lot of lately, which is funny, because I've had a lot more time on my hands than ever before in my adult life.

I'm a person who loves the adventure of traveling around, seeing new places, revisiting old ones to reconnect. Constancy is good, but it's not a high priority for me. I do, however, need alone time to recharge my introverted side, and when I'm constantly around people, I can get irritated more easily. But after about five months of being a vagabond - staying in other people's houses and going wherever I'm needed or wherever the next thing is happening - I need a place to be mine, to unpack and settle again. That might not come for a few more months (hopefully I'm still dealing with months and not a longer time frame!), but I'll sure be grateful for that space when I can have it again. There's a part of me that won't get to unwind until then.

I am getting to a place, though, in my mind and heart, where I am grateful again for the time I have here. I'm getting to a place where I am happy with my purpose here again, which (like I've probably said before) is actually not different from my purpose overseas anyway. Some people have told me that my recent blogs have been depressing. (I actually thought they've at least ended upbeat.) This reflecting, while not always positive, is leading me and others to a deeper understanding of myself, and I think that's part of the reason I'm here (in this place and in these circumstances) for now. And instead of impatience, I'm going to try to patiently delve deeper into whatever understanding I can get.

A quote from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, the Annie Dillard book I'm currently (joyously) wrapped up in:

"God is subtle," Einstein said, "but not malicious." Again, Einstein said that "nature conceals her mystery by means of her essential grandeur, not by her cunning." It could be that God has not absconded, but spread, as our vision and understanding of the universe have spread, to a fabric of spirit and sense so grand and subtle, so powerful in a new way, that we can only feel blindly of its hem. In making the thick darkness a swaddling band for the sea, God "set bars and doors" and said, "Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further." But have we come even that far? Have we rowed out to the thick darkness, or are we all playing pinochle in the bottom of the boat?