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lately about Peter, and how he dealt with Christ leaving. I’ve been having a still and silent couple of days, walking in and out of rooms like every one was a garden, and following sunlight like a leaf. I have so much to do but I’m only doing what I can, and not crying about the rest, which is normally what I do. Yesterday I bought two new tires and got a partial alignment. Good, that my Dad wants to take care of me, wants to drive away from his workplace to meet me and look at tires, wants to loan me enough to get tires with 40,000 miles on them. I got a kefir at the Co-op, and he got fig bars.
Stillness of days has to do with thinking, this about how I get cared-for, this about how rich I feel, being the owner of two new tires! Also with Innocence Mission, since I put on Christ is my Hope yesterday and haven’t taken it off. I take it to the car when I have to drive, bring it inside when I have to come inside. I realized (an aside) that “O Lord of Light” is a Gregorian chant. Of course, oh of course. Maybe someday I will meet the Perises on earth … otherwise, it will be after. The stillness also has to do with an empty house (wonder where my roommates are), and with reading Acts, thinking about Paul and Peter. How were things, just after Christ left? It seems that paradigms were being broken. Strange, that things would change so much … but only after He left. It’s like Him being there was so many years of people being incredulous, so many years of people standing there looking at the sky, wondering if they were dreaming. Sometimes you have to leave the presence of a miracle before you can understand it, or let your life be changed by it, I think. I’m still thinking.
My dearfriend’s parents gave me a birthday present today, which is a gift card to go buy myself an oil-filled radiator, because he told them that I’m poor, and often cold. The gift card has too much money on it, though, and they said to spend the rest on whatever … the world is alive with possibilities, and I am all warm already, thinking about having a heater of my own, and something else too. Like, maybe I could go see a movie, or buy some pants, or some coffee. This is the kind of generous gesture that breaks, again, the resurgent poverty mentality that I unconsciously use to help my financial poverty make more sense. In fact, it ruins my life.
I feel both like I know a secret and like I knew a secret but keep forgetting it, because of gifts like this that are so wholly unexpected, so wholly undeserved.
I hardly worry anymore about where the money will come from, because it always comes. I look … and it is there. I get back home at night and there are onions and apples and lentils, with a sign that says “ANNA LAURA” in black sharpie on the back of a box of disposal insulin syringes. Something in me stands up very sharp without taking a breath, I feel the orange light from the sunset flickering behind, I wonder how it feels to be a gift, if you feel very proud or if you are shy. Both, I think.
This morning as I opened my front door to charge off into the day, I saw two cardboard boxes on our welcome mat, no names or signs, but filled with food. One box had a half gallon of orange juice, a pint of half & half, a lb of strawberries, a pint of Green’s Amber Ale, a huge bag of lentils, smaller bags of pumpkin seeds, almonds and cashews, a box of Annie’s macaroni mix, two boxes of Luna’s and Lärabar energy bars, a can of coconut milk, two lbs of basmati rice, what seems to be about two/three lbs of “Farmer’s Cheese,” and single cans of garbanzo beans, great northern beans, cannellini, kidney beans, salad beans and “soup beans.” The other box held bags of eight Pink Lady apples, seven yellow onions, ten new potatoes, two honeycrisp apples, one green pear and two red pears and a smallish orange gourd of some sort.
This at a time when I needed it. Yesterday I was thinking about how it felt impossible to eat well, because stocking up a pantry is expensive at the outset, and about all I have right now is flour. So someone brings all this food, and my first impulse is to run around the neighborhood asking “did you bring this?” Because a) I don’t deserve it, and b) I feel a tiny nudge of outrage when I’d prepared myself to be overlooked and suddenly it’s obvious that I am noticed. Isn’t it strange that I can be upset with God at allowing me to be poor and then upset when it becomes clear that all my wanderings are only inside His garden.
I put it all on the couch with a sign for Claire and Brittany (“Girls! Look!!”) and left the house, crossing the street in a river of golden air. After all our rain, the piercingly blue mornings are visiting us in East Tennessee and as I got to my car I noticed it was covered in tiny white fuzzy aphids. In dry seasons of the soul, every grace seems stranger than possible, but when I am awakening I am not surprised to find that living flakes of snow have slept on my car all night long. I am not surprised to find their legs and backs like ice crystals and like cotton.
Walking downtown, then, from free parking in the Old City up to Coffee & Chocolate, I pass an old man combing his long beard and another man who nods and says “what’s happenin’ sister.”
You look back on past days with nostalgia, realizing that a certain year in which you pinched and scraped, or cried a lot, maybe every night, was the year you went the most places and lived the most deeply. You remember it and wish you’d realized its depth of color at the time. This morning, walking down Gay Street, I did this. It was partly the fall morning, partly all the colors and the extravagant gift on the doorstep, partly the moving toward grad school and partly having Marshall as a dearest friend, all this, wading through it like I’d escaped the mental hospital and was wandering through a Narnian wood. Via wardrobe. I believe in wardrobes, you know.
If I can start expecting the world to be closed to me and then get a huge box of clothes in the mail from KG & Emily, boxes of food on the doorstep, a free bus ticket to Nashville to see Mary Oliver & my Great Friends, letters and checks here and there from unexpected quarters at unexpected times, then it seems I will have to keep turning. And by turning, I mean turning on my axis or on my stem, following my new understanding of the working of the universe like I am turning my leaves to the sun. Turning as in turning into the person that is turning into the right kind of person, the kind that is able to expect miracles every day, and is not surprised to find them, not surprised to have to wait for them either because of the certainty that they are there, the certainty that I will find them if they are ready to be found.
