You know it’s a good vacation when I forget to take pictures with my camera. The only pics I have are from Instagram… so my apologies go out to my followers there. It’s a repeat show for you.

In Eureka there are old springs that used to be considered “healing waters.” This is my favorite. It’s a cave just below the ground. It was 100 degrees above those stairs when I took the picture. Down below it was a gorgeous 65. Had I been living in Eureka during the pre-air conditioner days I’d have parked a chair down in the cool darkness and set up a summer home down there in nature’s air conditioner.

There’s always a candle lit down there. If feels a bit like church to me. It’s impossible not to be reverent when you see unique and beautiful places like this, or when you think about the clear water bubbling under the ground that was once considered magic. I’m so thankful God’s imagination is beyond mine.

I’ll be honest folks.

Life hasn’t been all peaches and roses lately. It’s been more like an airplane ride, only I’m strapped to the nose of the plane and the wind speed is making it impossible to close my eyes.

But just for this weekend I forgot about all that. I thought about how beautiful life is. How it’s not just parking lots and commutes and stressful work situations and lonely nights by myself. There’s a whole big world out there, full of sparkling springs and caves and Victorian homes and restaurants within walking distance. It’s seasides and sunsets and crickets chirping at twilight. It’s Jane’s laughs and giggles at bath time, it’s hope that things can, and will, change.

I also realized that sometimes when we pray to God for a change in our life, it doesn’t happen overnight. It comes on slowly, at it’s own pace… in His own time. I think that’s happening in my life right now. No overnight miracles… just slow, cautious steps toward something a little different. A little better. A little closer to the feeling of cool calm air I found in this spring, just below the surface.

I look tired in this picture because I am. So very tired.

No matter the trials, no matter the stresses, the Lord is still with me.

Weekends. Whew. I love them, but lately, they’re harder than a work week. I’ve been so tired lately. When I get tired I wear less makeup. And that always makes me think about the time, way back when, I asked my sisters if I looked better with or without makeup.

One of them responded, “Well. You kind of look like Shelley Duval without it.”

And it’s true.

I have these great big eyelids, and if they don’t have eyeshadow I look just like her.

Olive Oyl.

That’s me.

I was going to take pictures of olives, but we’re out. So avocados will have to do.

Anyway.

So that’s me. Looking forward to the weekend.

I’ll be sure to wear some eyeshadow.

I had dinner with my sisters the other night. We had tenderloin and risotto. Jane was asleep to the sound of rain on her noisemaker. The crickets chorused in full force in the yard, and inside there was so much talking. Wonderful, sisterly, giggly talking.

I’ve missed all three of us being together. It’s like my right arm is missing when I don’t have it.

It was my favorite soundtrack. Jane’s sleep sounds on the monitor. Summertime outside. Laughing. I tried my best to soak it all in, storing it up for the ten months we’re without Becca again. It was wonderful.

 

 

I got so frustrated I cried in public today. I never do that. It was humiliating. I don’t want to go into the details of it, but life has been hard lately. It seems that Jane is sick with one thing or another all the time (and us). Life is unorganized and chaotic. I’m alone a lot. The little frustrations dog-pile into bigger frustrations. I love my family, and my life, and my job, but sometimes it seems like they’re all at war with each other… and there is only so much of me to go around.

Big, deep breaths.

Big, tearful prayers.

This morning I sat in the kitchen and ate my bowl of cereal. Jane’s baby monitor buzzed softly, birds chirped outside the window, and the neighborhood sprinklers made their “tick tick tick” sound up and down the street. Instead of sitting at the dining room table I sat in the rickety turquoise chair in our kitchen, the chair we keep around for standing on to reach light bulbs.

Mabel ate her food contentedly by my feet. She likes company at meal time. I finished my cereal (exactly 110 calories portioned out with a measuring cup) and decided I was going to eat a blueberry muffin too. A dog barked next door and Mabel paused mid chew, made a throaty “grrfff” sound and went back to eating.

 Just then the baby monitor lights flashed and I heard Jane say “hi” in her highest pitched girl voice. She’s starting to sound so much more like a tiny kid than a baby these days. I love that. I love that she wakes up and her first reaction is a cheerful “hi” rather than crying. If she cries it means something is really wrong. It looks like my girl might be a morning person too. That’s good. I need someone to share muffins with.