thirty days

Thirty days is a long time.  It's time enough to form a new habit, serve jail time with Lindsay Lohan, or grow your hair out half an inch.  In thirty days the earth will spin around thirty times, and you can sample a month of Amazon.com Prime membership (with free 2 day shipping!) at no charge.  Thirty days can turn a losing team into a winning one, a dying plant into a thriving one.

Despite all the things that can happen in a month's time, we're all aware of just how quickly the calendar's page begs to be flipped once again.  A month is nothing!  Which explains my excitement but also my anxiety when I realized yesterday that October 23rd was only thirty days away.  For those of you who have dared not to fervently follow my agenda, this date has been in my brain for most of 2010.  On October 23rd, at 7 AM, someone will fire a gun into the air and I will proceed to run for 26.2 miles.  I haven't lost my mind, but I have decided to run my first-ever marathon (which some would say are equivalent statements.)

I've been running for exercise off and on over the last 2 years, but at this point I've been specifically training for the marathon for 14 weeks.  It's been fourteen weeks of early mornings, side stitches, tight hamstrings, aching knees, blisters and hideous toenails.  But it's also been fourteen weeks of beautiful sunrises, refreshing rains, riverside trails, new friends, and surprisingly honest conversations.  It's been three months of growing stronger, running faster, trusting that the long mileage scheduled for me each Saturday morning will not only be doable, but even enjoyable!  And so my feet, which two years ago could run no further than two miles, can now carry me for at least twenty.  And in thirty days, they will carry me across a finish line that has become so much more than a mark on the road.  The summer passed before I could even wish it well, and the next month will only fly even faster.  But as I look back, I can't help but smile for how much that's happened, for how much ground I have covered.  And I know that in thirty days, when those fearsome 26.2 miles are behind me, I will have the strength to keep going, to keep growing, to keep running ahead.

to be a tree

A tree is not afraid to grow.  Beginning from a single, tiny seed, with time she towers over the world beneath her.  She puts down roots; she stretches out her legs deep underground to say, "I'm not going anywhere."  A tree is strong enough to hold climbing children and wooden forts, but flexible, yielding,  willing to bend with winds and rain.  And if she is lucky enough to have some, she doesn't cling selfishly to her fruit, but lets us pick apples from her boughs, dropping a few to the ground for hungry squirrels.  A tree is a shelter, a home to nests of bees, badgers, and birds, a safe haven for a stranded picnicker.  Her skin is tough, for she lives in the wild, you see, but underneath the defense lies soft, tender wood.  She flows with sap and water, her branches are coursing with life.  A tree doesn't raise her voice, but gently whispers with rustling leaves to her family around her.  How I would love to be like the trees that grow outside my window!  To live with grace and dignity and patience, a true observer of the natural world.  To take everything in stride without complaining, whether rain or its lack, scorching heat or chilling winters.  To know that even when my leaves are changing orange to red to brown and falling down I am beautiful beyond measure.  To stand bare and vulnerable before God and the universe for a whole season, with branches unprotected but still reaching proud and strong for the heavens.  A tree never ceases gazing upward, never hunches her shoulders.  She remembers always the green promise of springtime.  She knows she is the Queen of the woods, the backbone of the forest, the foundation of the earth.  Even when  attacked by weather or by men with axes,  she doesn't fight the death that comes to all of us.  With open arms she gives her life away, and she lives on in our dining room tables, in the soil to which she returns, in the memories of the children and lovers who danced beneath her branches.  A tree is not afraid to die, because she has known the beauty of a life truly lived.

a clean start

If you ever come over to my house, there are some things you'd learn about me right away.  You would see that while my small TV looks  like it hasn't been turned on for six months, I have books and magazines everywhere.  You'd learn that I may be the only girl on the planet with only 10 pairs of shoes.  You'd notice that I really like folk music and that I should probably dust more often (or ever).  But in all of this hypothetical inferencing, please don't let the slightly-larger-than-average pile of dirty clothes in my hamper lead you to believe that I dread doing laundry.  

The truth is, I anticipate laundry day with a subtle giddiness reminiscent of the moments preceding an Easter egg hunt.  I use this particular analogy because we all know that an Easter egg hunt isn't always profitable.  Sometimes your spoils include those real-live hard boiled eggs that have been sitting in the sun now for a few hours and have recently been discovered by ants.  Or even worse, you get the plastic eggs full of some awful candy like black licorice or the large, cheap jellybeans that may have at one point tasted like something resembling fruit.  

But then there are those sweet, rarer finds like eggs with Reese's peanut butter cups or the good jellybeans (duh, the Starburst kind) or when I was younger, the ever elusive 'golden' egg that was tediously hidden and whose contents almost always included a wadded-up twenty dollar bill.  Twenty dollars is a lot of money when you're a kid whose major purchases have a $5 ceiling.  Heck, two decades later, twenty dollars is still a lot of money...for me, anyway.

So when laundry day rolls around, there is this moment, you see, that has the potential to lift my spirits to the skies for the rest of the day.  It comes at the end of the dryer cycle, when my clothes have been tumbling around in a whirlpool of air and warmth, when the buzzer sounds and summons me from my cozy spot on the couch where I've likely been reading some intriguing story, like the one I've been devouring this week about a guy named Eustace Conway who literally lives in and off of the wilderness. After I've removed my clothes from the dryer piece by piece, tossing them into my small white basket,  I take the lint catcher from the dryer, crossing my fingers, and if I'm really lucky, then I get to do it.  I get to peel that glorious, warm, blue-grey lint from the filter in one giant piece.  It only counts if it ALL comes off in one go.  There's no going back to clean up your work.  But when this happens, I can't even really describe to you, I'm just happy.  Perhaps I'm a simple soul.  It doesn't take much to make my day.  All I know is this: there are not many things in this world that come to such a neat and tidy end.  Things get broken and shattered and people spend all their lives cleaning up the pieces and working things out the way they want them, sometimes settling for a mug that has been superglued together, though it still looks much like the original.  Sometimes we get rotten eggs and cheap jellybeans.  But every once in a while you can go to your dryer and you can peel the lint off the filter in one swoop, and for that moment it feels as though everything has always been and will always be clean, fresh, simple.