Bronze

Last week, Brice and I celebrated our anniversary, and it was so much fun. You can see the pics Brice posted here. We enjoyed relearning the rumba,* then getting to dance it and be goofy pretending to dance other things (it turns out that collectively we could only recall waltz, swing, samba, and cha-cha—and mostly only the basic steps at that). Then we went out for sushi, and let us just take a moment to recognize the craziness that is me eating sushi. The first time I tried sushi was less than three years ago, and when I did, it was one of those really the-fish-is-barely-there sushis. And I still had to take a few calming breaths and work myself up to it. So this was the first time I ever really just dove into a plate full of lots of raw fish, and it was really quite tasty! Brice put together an epic date night.

Traditionally, each wedding anniversary has a type of gift associated with it. For example, the first is paper, the second cotton, etc. For some reason (which I no longer remember), when our first anniversary rolled around, we decided it would be fun to do something related to these traditional gifts each year. Some of them have been quite memorable: the tiny homemade paper piñata Brice made for our first anniversary; the silly cotton ball poster of a sheep I made for Brice the next year; the time we made an offer on our new house in Maryland for our fifth anniversary (wood, lots and lots of wood). Some I have admittedly forgotten (what in the world did we do for fruit?).

This year is bronze.

Many moons ago, when I was still an undergrad, I took a sculpture class in which we cast bronze using lost-wax casting. It is a long process and involves a not insignificant amount of sand and grit. You have to slowly work up the layers of the mold over the course of days and weeks. Sometimes you have to fix parts that break. There is sandblasting and blowtorching and polishing and chiseling. There is attention to detail and patience.

Ummm, yes. This is the work of a college
student, not a three-year-old.

My gift this year is not another bronze sculpture (you can see from the picture that working in bronze is not my strong point, yes?). It’s just a little verbal tribute to my husband and our relationship. It has been (and continues to be) a process. There was the shower curtain incident, my dislike of his music, that one** time he thought he was fixing my problem and I thought he was telling me I was insane (that was this week). There has been a gradual process of learning to like dark chocolate and things like sushi. He’s still learning to fold the towels correctly, and it only took me five years to figure out how to properly hang his dress pants—but at least we agree on how to load a dishwasher (mostly).

He encourages me by example to be a better visiting teacher and friend. His presence in my life has tempered my tendency toward badly placed sarcasm.*** He makes people feel welcome and befriended and appreciated—even the harassed airline ticket agent who got cussed out just before we reached her. He reminds me to be a better, kinder person.

There have been moments of sandblasting and parts that got broken. Some things are easier to fix (we just agree to disagree about music), and some may take a lifetime (oh my gosh, we are conflict avoidant), but it’s all part of making something fine and beautiful. Eight years ago, eight years seemed like a long time. Now it feels like maybe just step one or two of the process, and I’m looking forward to more.

Happy bronze anniversary (late, as always, when it comes to blogging) to my epic hubby!

* It’s been about eleven years since Latin dance class.

** “One” is a total lie, by the way. I just can’t count them all.

*** I still do it, just less than I used to.

Mid August Picture Time

Our 8th anniversary. We went dancing! Had a lesson on Rumba. Danced. Talked. (Towson Dance Studio). I am exceptionally blessed and very grateful to have such a wonderful spouse. I love you! Happy anniversary!

Anniversary dinner at Umi Saki. This dinner / plate would have been unimaginable a few years ago. Now she's so adventurous.

Delicious (and big for a single bite)

Before the race. The face paint is supposed to look like the "Mud Factor" mascot, which is that grey skull guy. The gap where the bandana is on the guy says "Mud Factor". Sensible, no?

Before race - gotta fill up that real estate.

Mud pit

Triumph

Post race laundry. Mmmm..muddy

Post race Rita's. Did they mention "unlimited toppings"?

Just look at those eyes. Use em for good kid, not for evil.

What beautiful, fashionable girls!

Dog tied to dress. Improvised blankie-hood. This is not uncommon in our house.

Love that girl!

Twirling. Walking around with a pet dog in a dress tied to your dress. Nice summer grass. What else do you need?

Swiiiiiiings! She loves swinging higher and faster for very long periods of time ( over an hour)

Subtitles for this look: "What you are saying doesn't make sense dad. Is you confused?"

C's drawing of a cheetah. We think it might be a "Trojan Cheetah", which is awesome. Also, it is alive, which is also awesome. You don't have to wheel it into your town - it just runs in before you can close the gate. The words above say: Love - yes, Brave - yes, of course.

Cocoon Time

About a month ago, Coriel found a tiny, pale green/yellow, hairy caterpillar on our front door. Having recently grown some mail-order caterpillars into beautiful painted lady butterflies, we decided to try our hand at this new one. So we gathered leaves from a number of plants around our front door and watched to see which one it ate. Once we figured it out, we gave it a steady diet thereof. And our caterpillar grew. As he molted, he darkened to a brownish black. Finally, one day, as if some inner instinct was triggered, our caterpillar zipped up to the top of the habitat we had him in and started growing his cocoon. (I say it seemed like something was triggered because up until that moment, he had always been slow, ponderous in his movement, and now—pow!—he zoomed.)

The world's worst picture of a fuzzy webby cocoon.

The next day he was happily stuck in his little cocoon spot on the roof of the habitat. I’d never seen a cocoon like this—it looked like essentially just a bunch of thick webbing keeping him stuck there. Kind of ugly and amazing at the same time.

So we waited and watched and hoped that he would hatch. In the meantime, we’d been seeing a lot of butterflies in our yard and garden, large black and yellow swallowtails. I hadn’t looked up what kind of caterpillar produced these beauties, but I secretly hoped that we would get one of those. After all, big black fuzzy body... big black butterfly, right?

On Friday, as usual, I checked on our little habitat—and saw that our cocoon had hatched. But far from producing a big black butterfly, it had produced a half-inch snowy white moth. Its body was furred and looked luxuriously soft and feathery. It was so very far from what I had expected or hoped for.

And I was thrilled.

What an amazing exhibit of nature’s majesty and the miracles produced around me every day! A fuzzy black caterpillar became a snowy white moth (like this dude here). It wasn’t showy and huge, but it was gorgeous.

Letting the moth go.

This week, I have been reading about adversity and the Lord’s counsel to us in adversity. He speaks of the gifts He has planned for us—both joy in our earthly existence and glory hereafter. He tells us that we cannot even begin to comprehend what He has in store. Looking at our pure white moth I got a tiny inkling of what He means. I would never, ever have suspected such a beautiful creation to come out of that cocoon. I expected something marvelous, but what I got was even better than I had imagined.

Did you know that while caterpillars are in that cocoon, they essentially break down into a caterpillar soup? There are a few bits and clusters of cells that don’t break down completely, but for the most part the caterpillar essentially digests itself to grow anew. This does not sound pleasant to me. But then their bodies start to rebuild, forming something far more wonderful.

I think life can be that way, if we permit it. Adversity is our cocoon time. And while the caterpillar is biologically wired to complete this transition successfully, we have to make that decision ourselves. We have to choose to allow God (through adversity) to break down our weaknesses, to rebuild us into something stronger. And when we allow God to do that work, what we get in the end is something pure and clean and strong, something better than we had in mind for ourselves.

More of us letting it go. Fly, moth, fly!

P.S. Raising a caterpillar is an experience that can only be described as epic. If you haven’t done it, you should. It’s fun, not very difficult once you know what it eats, and just plain amazing. Plus, you can totally count it as educational.

Brake Pads

Note: Even though my crazy driving phobia rears its ugly head here again, what this post is really about is gratitude and blessings. Feel free to not comment on my personal baggage.

About a month ago, when I stopped at an intersection on my way to a church activity, the brakes gave off the most dreadful grinding, screeching sound. It had been a tiring day, and since driving still terrifies me on a fairly regular basis, I almost turned around and drove (carefully) right back home. Instead I just pulled over, freaked out a little (a lot), and tested the brakes in the parking lot for a few minutes before eventually driving on. At the activity that night, I mentioned the experience and a friend suggested, from experience, that it was the brake pads. The next day we took the car to the mechanic, and we got ourselves some new brake pads.

Fast forward to a week ago. I’d just visited a friend’s yard sale and was on my way home (down Ritchie Highway) with another friend following behind me, lugging a chair for me in her van.

The roads weren’t particularly busy that morning, but Ritchie is a 45-mph, multilane road, and I was going along briskly when, far in front of me (but not far enough for this to be a good idea), a fellow started across the road from the right lane. I was in the far left lane, so I figured that by the time he got to my lane he would speed up to cross ahead of me or stop in the lane before mine so I could pass. Either way was kind of a lousy idea for him, but whatever.

I kept watching him for signs of hesitation or even any recognition that I was coming toward him. This all, of course, happened very quickly (as things tend to at car speeds), and in the meantime I was slowing down just a bit to see what he would do. It had not yet entered my mind that he would completely ignore the car hurtling toward him—not even turn his head to “look both ways” a single time before continuing to mosey into my lane of traffic.

When he did so, I panicked. I started braking hard and fast. Really, really hard and fast. I screamed. I didn’t honk, which was unfortunate (but all my brain could process was to stop the car). I didn’t swerve, which I probably could have done (but again, the brain processing thing). I just screamed and braked.

You know those scenes you see in the movies where the car hits a pedestrian, and the body rolls up the windshield and bounces over the car? This is the scene that was playing through my mind in those brief moments. I was absolutely certain I was going to hit this man. Did I mention I used to have nightmares about driving? A lot. I still do, occasionally, but they don’t usually have quite the same punch they used to. Anyway, this would have been one of those nightmares, only without the lovely waking up part.

Guess how close I got to hitting him?

Well, the car completely stopped (thank you, Elissa, for not following me very closely in your van—I’m glad you didn’t crash into me when I stopped). The man still had not turned to look in my direction, not once. But he finally did turn to look at me when he walked into the corner of my bumper.

He had gone all the way across the lane in front of me, but then he veered just enough toward me to tap into the far left side of the car, after I had barely stopped. And you know how sometimes when you bump into a table accidentally, you sort of turn toward it and say “Oops” or something equally brilliant?* That’s when this man I’d almost run down turned and saw me for the first time, with something like surprise in his eyes.

After a moment in which we looked at each other and perhaps pondered our own mortality, he moved on and I drove away.

I am so grateful for new brake pads. I’m grateful that I was the one driving the car when the original grinding sound occurred. Brice knows my driving issues, and so I think he was very quick to allay my worries and go to the mechanic. I don’t know how long the brake pads still would have worked reasonably well, or how long we would have put off the trip to the mechanic, but I know they wouldn’t have worked well enough for this. I also doubt the brakes on the other car would have been good enough; for this moment, we needed new brake pads. I am certain that God was protecting me from an event that would have utterly shattered me (not to mention—I add with a bit of morbid levity—him). I’m grateful Elissa was driving far behind me. I’m grateful that despite my frozen brain and unimpressive panicked reactions, I still was blessed to do just enough to avoid hitting him.

The safety of this moment was nothing less than a miracle, and I am grateful.

Joe Junior, who (incidentally) looks nothing like the pedestrian.

*In a comical turn of events, I was reminded of the moment in While You Were Sleeping when Joe Junior bumps into a tree branch with his New Year’s party hat and apologizes to the tree. I watch too many movies.