7 long long takes

One

It's the end of June. A great fog is clinging to the hill and the yellow house across the street, wrapping everything in heavy humid mystery and making the landscape just vaguely more interesting. I couldn't be happier. It is so marvelous to feel hot enough, to be able to wander around the garden barefoot, to go outside even in the morning and not have my whole flesh seize up from the chill, to walk up the hill dragging my hot angry poodle behind me.

“Why is he walking so far behind you?” A neighbor asked two days ago. “Normally dogs like that run out in front.

“I know,” I said. “He's just very lazy and he hates to go up this hill.”

The neighbor looked at me with suspicion, like maybe I was abusing the poor dog, making him walk up a gentle incline, instead of letting him lie around like he does all winter, getting rounder and rounder. Like the children, he dislikes the heat and the cold. While they whine about it being too hot, he runs and hides under the dining room table whenever I unearth his leash.

“What kind of dog is he?” The neighbor went on, his brow furrowed.

“I think he's a poodle mixed with terrier or something,” I said.

“He looks like a cokapoo,” he said, backing up three steps, his back to the wall, as if he felt the need of distance.

“Wow, thanks” I said, and toiled on. A cokapoo! That sounds utterly weird and horrible. What kind of combination of dogs is that? I pulled on the leash and Ash looked up at me with his teeth and his eyes and we both shuddered.

Two

At the end of every month I breathe a sigh of relief thinking, wrongly, that now, going into a new month, everything will slow down and be less insane. It doesn't matter if it's December into January or March into April or now, June into July. I've spent the whole week saying, well, June is almost over and so everything will slow down because we don't have anything to do in July. Until I start counting birthdays and little play times and things I've promised to do and the fact that I'm starting my new school year and then suddenly it's just as busy as every other month.

“But at least there's no baseball,” Matt says, every few minutes, comforting himself.

“And no fencing,” I add, shuffling all my lists in an unrealistic attempt to calm my shattered nerves. “We'll have time to sit around and read,” I lie, “and go to Cole Park and the library all the time,” piling falsehood upon falsehood.

The kids are none too pleased about starting school. “It's not going to be all day!” I promise them, “just a few hours in the morning. If we start now we might be able to take time off later.” Nobody really believes me, least of all myself.

Three

Yesterday this baby bird was discovered outside the church. Covered in mites, flopping about, looking extremely unwell. He perished in the course of the morning and Marigold, in her four year old death obsessed way was extemely interested. “The baby bird went to be with Jesus” she says every few minutes. “He died.” She says the word 'died' with true relish, like its a special treat.

Four

I finished Isaiah this week, in the Bible, and got to the part in Kings and Chronicles where the Book of the Law is discovered in the temple and brought to Josiah and read. It's such a striking picture. Josiah wants the temple repaired and so everyone gets busily to work, and while they're mending and fixing and cleaning, somone unearths Ye Old Bible, as Matt has taken to calling it, and dusts it off and reads it. What a shock. And then it says, and what an indictment, that the Passover had not been celebrated in Israel since the days of the Judges. !!! Amazing. The people just carried on for hundreds and hundreds of years, the book lost, the Passover neglected, shocked at every moment to have the Assyrians and Babylonians and Egyptians always breathing down their necks.

Josiah's reforms, reading the book, celebrating the Passover, tearing down all the high places, seem like too little too late except that, having found the book, it goes with them to Babylon, and thence to the ends of the world. Daniel and his friends must have been products of this discovery and reading, which resulted eventually in the Magi coming to see Jesus. It's a comfort in this dark time of biblical illiteracy. This week I listened to a sermon from some non-denom church in Virginia. The pastor stood looking out at his people, waving his arms and shouting inane and ridiculous and untrue things about the Bible into his flesh colored microphone. Things that if he had taken a few weeks to read the whole thing, he would have been embarrassed about. Everyone thinks they know what it says but their own copy is shoved at the bottom of a book shelf and the stuff they're actually reading is scrawled on posters in the church loo or on Facebook. For every church and person who gets a good copy, and dusts if off, and reads it carefully, and rends the heart, there will be far reaching effects. God's Word doesn't ever return empty.

Five

Still, it can be discouraging how long God takes to do things. And how many weeds and tares tangle themselves everywhere and muck things up. As I've been constantly weeding Elphine's Garden (that's right, we gave Elphine a little spot for herself but then it turned out that I actually put all the plants in it, and I do all the weeding, but then she brings friends over and shows them 'her own garden'; meanwhile I have found Gladys out in the driving rain, carefully pouring a pitcher of water over some carrot seeds, because, she said, “I promised myself I would water them every day”) I have been horrified to discover this particular weed that deliberately nestles itself in the shade of real flowers and plants, very close to the root, so that it is very hard to rend them out without destroying the plant. “This is so evil” I always mutter to myself, angrily, “and yet so very very very biblical.”

Six

Here I am reading Paddington to the children–one of my favorite books of all time ever.

Which makes me very very worried about the Paddington Movie. When I learned on Facebook that a movie is indeed coming out, I began to be, and continue to be, really anxious about how awful it could be. I still feel scarred by the terrible terrible terrible Secret Garden movie, and the terrible Heidi movie, and genuinely and truly still ticked off about the second Hobbit movie…Paddington? There is probably No Way they cannot completely bungle it. And yet my kids are all going to want to see it, and so our lives will just be ruined.

Seven

And on that up note, I'm going to wish you all a good weekend and implore you to go read Jen who is an actual blogger with a scintillating life.