The Learning

In high school, before I was ever in a serious relationship, I read a lot of relationship books. Books with titles like 5 Paths to the Love of Your Life and For Young Women Only: What You Need to Know About How Guys Think and Real Sex: The Naked Truth About Chastity. (And no, I never read I Kissed Dating Goodbye, because of my aversion to what my family deemed the detrimentally fundamentalist Christian courtship model. And did you know that Relient K wrote a book about girls? It's called The Complex Infrastructure Known as the Female Mind, and yes, it's on my bookshelf). 

Books on marriage, sex, divorce, and childrearing were often laying around our house -- a product of my Dad's profession as a psychologist. And I would read them, or portions of them, with the utmost fascination. What were they telling my parents about teenagers? How could I understand myself? Did romance disappear as soon as you got married? Would dating a number of different people make me feel empty and depleted? I needed to know. 

And since I didn't have a boyfriend, I took the safer but less empirical approach to relationships and just spent time reading about them instead. 

Then, eventually, I dated and got my heart broken and broke people's hearts. Sometimes I ignored wise people and I ignored God, but when I listened, beautiful things happened to my heart.

I grew up a bit and matured, with a lot of blips along the way. I stopped compromising and justifying. 

And now I'm in a very blessed relationship with a man who happens to defy pretty much every category into which I could have put him and every definable relational trend that I thought those books prepared me to tackle.

So really, I've ended up feeling just as unequipped as your next 20-something to handle arguments, desires, insecurities, anger, naiveté, inadequacy, my own immaturity and selfishness, and a whole slough of other issues that no one really likes to talk about in any regular conversation.

I'm learning that every couple is different. Every relationship witnesses both universal struggles and unique ones. Only in wading through all this together can you really learn how to love in the real way, the lasting way. And no one can really tell you how to do this, because they can't.

I read somewhere once that you should always hold hands with each other when you argue. Well, you can't do that when you're on the phone and you're in a long-distance relationship.

My 'complex infrastructure' hates to mess up. I do my best to work towards healthy and joy-filled relationships, but I screw things up a lot more than I would like. But I can hope to keep learning how to forgive and be forgiven.

Because loving is one of the most difficult, soul-wrenching, fulfilling, and rewarding undertakings we can ever attempt as fallible and fallen human beings. 

Sommer

And the long-anticipated moment has come. 

The moment where I run barefoot to the backyard, stretch out on a brightly-colored beach towel, turn back the cover of a fresh novel, and feel the kiss of sun-warmth on my back.

And all the summer moments that follow.

When I woke up I didn't touch the curly little wisps escaping from my ponytail. 

I didn't set an alarm. 

I didn't worry about anything.

The youthful faces of jubilant sunflowers on my windowsill greeted me.  

Mail -- three perfect little notes -- lay on my desk awaiting my fingertips. "I hope you've found some moments to let your mind wander, to create and celebrate life in all its beauty, and to feel the peace and presence of God," wrote a dear friend. "Use this time to think, Em," wrote my best friend.


My favorite rosebush, with its tiny, fragrant, delicately purple blooms, is done flowering. I collected three eggs from our chickens -- each was a slightly different hue of brown, a slightly different ovoid size. The blueberry bushes are laden with promising, pale little blushes of unripe berries.

I listened to my mom practicing Debussy's Clair de Lune.

I stirred a thickening roux over the stove as I reacquainted myself with my family's laughter. 

There's a red-and-white china teacup, a bird's nest with broken robin's eggs nestled inside, an antique electric fan, my Grandpa's toy car, a deteriorating old copy of Jane Eyre in French on my shelf.

Oh yes, I am remembering... I found that '50s clock in an Istanbul pawn shop and carried it home in my suitcase. I picked up that postcard at the Anne Frank museum in Amsterdam. I bought that art print from a booth in Pike Place Market. And there are the photos. Dancing, rolling with laughter, embracing, growing up, lapping up ice cream... I remember travels and lessons and who I am and who has loved me. 

I sit in the redolent haze of affable memories. 

And I remember other summers, the feel of speeding bicycle tires and sandpaper-rough diving boards and heat-radiating sidewalks, the taste of melting fruit popsicles and late-night dinners outside, the sound of lawns being mowed, the scent of dry pine trees and wild sagebrush. 

Kisses of indefatigable summer, 

of blessed solitude, 

of buoyant activity. 

Home is familiar and yet I rediscover it every time after a long absence. And I begin to know its impermanence and see its transitions. And so I grow all the more thankful for this long-awaited time at home.

'Loveliness,' says the top of the old tin chocolate box that rests upon the stack of coffee-table books.