Beauty on the Backroads

Stories of grace for life's unexpected turns

Lisa

End of summer, start of school: August round-up

Friends, how in the name of all that is good and holy did August pass us by? It is now September and I don’t know how to feel. In August, we returned from vacation, endured hotter-than-Hades temperatures, and prepped for the return to work and school (and then went to work and school), so our round-up of things we did, ate, watched and read feels a little bit lesser this month, but there were still some big things (like one of our family turned a birthday age that ends in “zero”).

Here’s a look at our month!

What We Did

Long’s Park Summer Music series: We only made it to two concerts because of weather and/or other commitments, but we enjoyed them both. The Paul Thorn Band was unexpectedly delightful (our kids hated it; it was blues/country/southern rock … whatevs), and Vanessa Collier who plays a mean sax and steel guitar. What I appreciated most about Collier’s concert was that there was so much instrumental I had time to let my mind just wander. 

Paul Thorn Band
Vanessa Collier

We squeezed in some friend visits with people we hadn’t seen in person for months or more than a year. I went to one friend’s house and we had a nice catch-up. Then we were able to finally get together with friends who headed back to their mission assignment in Kenya. Our plan with them was to meet for ice cream, but it stormed that night and the place we picked wasn’t open for dine-in, so we pivoted and met back at our house and dug into our personal ice cream stash. (We almost always have an ice cream stash.) It was good to be together.

Hiking! We went to Steinman Run Nature Preserve for a nearly 3-mile loop hike. It was another hot day so we tried to get out early. We were home by 11. It was muddy and buggy and the kids were cranky but it was a beautiful walk through the woods, along a stream (which we crossed several times), up and down some gentle hills. My mind needed it for clarity.

My happy place, even when my people aren’t always happy to be there

More hiking! Our last summer hike with people from our church. This time we went to Climbers Run, which our family had hiked a few months’ back. (I fell in the creek, remember?) We did a lot of rock scampering and got our feet wet in the creek A LOT, met new people and had a great time. This one was particularly fun because we were all looking out for each other and each other’s kids as we scrambled over the rocks. It felt like an unintentional team-building exercise.

I joined a new book club, also associated with our church, and we had an outdoor in-person meeting to discuss Such A Fun Age (I finished this book on vacation.) I had a great time with this sassy, smart group of women and look forward to sticking with them through the fall and winter and beyond.

School supply shopping. Online, again because it’s honestly easier that way. Plus, it’s exciting to receive packages!

Back-to-school night for our last year of elementary. Our son met his teachers for the year. We saw some of our previous teachers, which was a treat. It was nice to be back in the school and getting a sense of what the year will be like.

Celebrated Phil’s 40th birthday. His birthday fell on a Friday, a work day, and our daughter baked some treats for him to take to his co-workers. The kids and I shopped at Building Character for some gifts that he opened later in the weekend. Two days after his birthday, we picked up Popeye’s chicken for dinner and watched Phil’s favorite movie (see below). Would we have done things differently in a post-Covid or pre-Covid world? Perhaps.

First Day(s) of School. We made it. And we were tired. The end.

6th grader
8th grader
Perpetual middle schooler

Book sale. Our son started school on a Monday, and our daughter was involved in orientation for seventh-graders (as an eighth-grade leader), so I took myself to the library’s ginormous used book sale. Friends, I was there for three hours, scouring books and standing in line to pay for said books. I walked out with 19 books for $50, a good deal if you ask me.

Some of these books are recent releases

A highlight of the outing was how I came into possession of one of the books. I’m on a mission to collect all the books in the Outlander series (hardback or the larger paperbacks if I can find them) and while I had already snapped up a small paperback of one book in the series, I caught a glimpse of a larger paperback of one of the books I needed. But, it was already in the stack of a couple of guys packing all their finds into boxes. I suspected they were booksellers and I desperately wanted to approach them but felt weird about asking for something they hadn’t yet purchased but were intending to make money off of. I circled them for a few minutes, watching out of the corner of my eye, then I walked to the other side of the room and looked at more books. Then, I went back and just got up the nerve to talk to them. I told them what I wanted and half-offered to pay them, but one of the guys said they could part with it. So, I asked where they were from and it turns out they’re from a popular bookstore in Harrisburg that I’ve been wanting to go to. I told them this, and that I follow them on Instagram, and we chatted a bit about what a visit there would look like. Now, I’m even more motivated to patronize this bookstore.

On the first Wednesday after school started, when the rest of us were occupied at our various schools, Phil took himself on a birthday birding adventure to Bombay Hook National Wildlife Refuge in Delaware.

He left before dawn to make the two-hour drive, stopped at a little diner called Helen’s Famous Sausage House for breakfast, then spent hours at the refuge doing what he loves at his own pace without interruption. (The rest of us are not always as patient or quiet when it comes to birding.) He saw dozens of herons, an owl, a spoonbill, and marsh wrens. (He was also covered in mosquito bites and had to swat biting flies constantly.) But he loved it, and I loved that we could gift him that time.

Bombay Hook National Wildlife Refuge/Photo by Phil Bartelt

A new friend turned 40 and I was invited to help celebrate at a local restaurant. A small group of us sat outside, eating, drinking and talking for hours, and it was an honor to be included.

What We Ate

TV dinners! Our kids had never had the pleasure of eating these, so on the night we arrived back from vacation, we went to the store for some staples and these for dinner. We wanted them to have a glimpse of our childhoods. I cheated, though, and picked out a healthier option that would not have been available in my childhood.

During one of our Sunday nights at Long’s Park, when our daughter was at a training for school, we grabbed takeout from Wegman’s: sushi for the boys, a beef on weck and potato salad for me, along with desserts: cookies and brownies.

On our last Wednesday before school started, it rained, so we ate ice cream in. Phil had purchased Dolcezza gelato from Whole Foods. We tried three flavors: stracciatella (chocolate chip), mascarpone and berries, tramantona (dulce de leche).

For Phil’s birthday: Popeye’s chicken (a variety of chicken and sides; they were out of biscuits!) and a cannoli cake. On the day of his birthday, we got cupcakes from Lancaster Cupcake.

For biscuits’ sake, can we get COVID under control?

Every year we do a back-to-school takeout or eat-out meal to celebrate the return to the school year. This year, the kids wanted Beast Burgers, a product of one of their favorite YouTubers. (Yes, we supported a YouTube millionaire with our back-to-school dinner.) This was my first ghost kitchen concept–Beast Burgers are made in existing restaurants according to the Beast Burger recipes. They weren’t too bad.

Beast Burger and some kind of loaded fries

This amazing chicken pot pie at Annie Bailey’s for the birthday party.

Yum.

What We Watched

The Olympics. Especially after we got back from vacation.

Virgin River. I finished season 2 and jumped right into season 3, finishing it in just a couple of days. And now I need a support group. Fortunately for me, there are 20-plus books in the series, so that’ll keep me busy till next year.

Falcon and The Winter Soldier. So good.

The Cook of Castamar. I saw this period drama on Netflix and was intrigued. I didn’t realize it was originally in Spanish, dubbed over in English, so I tried different combinations of languages and subtitles and realized the easiest one for my eyes and sanity is to listen to the Spanish audio while watching the English subtitles. When the mouths and sounds don’t match, it bothers me and I have a hard time concentrating. So, if I stick with this one, I’ll be doing a lot of reading and not much else. (I now have two episodes left. It hooked me. Also, some publishing company needs to get on an English translation of the book, stat!)

Crazy Rich Asians. After reading the book, I checked the movie out from the library. It was okay. I liked the book better.

Grace and Frankie, season 7. I was on this the day after it dropped. This show makes me laugh so much. But they only released four episodes because that’s what they had available before COVID hit. So, I must wait a little longer.

LegoMasters. More stunningly creative with each episode.

Upload. This series gets more interesting the more episodes we watch.

Loki. Um, what? It’s good, and my mind is confused.

Kim’s Convenience. Still working our way through the seasons.

Berry Gordy’s The Last Dragon. This is one of Phil’s favorite movies and he popped it in on the Sunday night we celebrated his birthday at home. It is … strange.

What We Read

The Weight of Memory by Shawn Smucker. Shawn is a friend, therefore, I trust him with the book journey. For a good chunk of this book, I dreaded moving forward, afraid he was going to lead me somewhere I didn’t want to go. But I also HAD TO keep reading because his storytelling is just that good. I ended up having mixed feelings about the book, but it’s a worthwhile read and I’ll probably re-read at a later date.

South by Ernest Shackleton. My final book for the Read Around the World challenge. It was super technical in spots and not always interesting but there were enough nuggets of wisdom and adventure to keep me reading. 

Dragon Overnight. The fourth book in the Upside-Down Magic series. A read-aloud at bedtime.

Say No to the Duke by Eloisa James. This was a “candy” kind of read for me. I had read a couple of heavier books that left me feeling weighed down, so I picked this one off my shelf. Once upon a time, I would have called it “trashy romance,” but that’s just rude. Yes, it’s a romance, and yes it’s one of THOSE books, but it served its purpose giving me a fun distraction for a day or so. It was not as good as the Bridgerton novels I’ve read, but that’s not to say it wasn’t enjoyable. I don’t know if I’ll pick up more from this author or series or not.

Untamed by Glennon Doyle. I think I underlined something on every page. Doyle’s books are always more about self-work than self-help, and after reading this one I made my own list of things that are easy responses to my feelings (binging Netflix, eating ice cream, scrolling social media endlessly) and things that are hard but are more beneficial. It’s good to see it on paper.

Beartown by Fredrik Backman. Un. For. Get. Able. I honestly don’t care what Backman writes about, his words are mesmerizing. This one’s about hockey but also about the things that bring us together and the things that drive us apart.

Spy Camp by Stuart Gibbs. Next up the Spy School series as a bedtime read-aloud. I really like Korman’s writing style.

China Rich Girlfriend by Kevin Kwan. A good follow-up to Crazy Rich Asians. I like these characters and the cultural education these stories provide.

Well, that’s all for August. See you in September!

What we can imagine

The kitchen grew steamy as I chopped four pounds of tomatoes we’d picked from our garden over the weekend. I had only a few days left before going back to work for the school year, and there are only so many tomatoes you can eat in a day. I’d already made fresh salsa and sliced up a few to accompany meals. So, it was time to can a few jars–to “put them up” for the winter as they say around here. (Do they say that other places?)

It took hours by the time I washed and diced the tomatoes, filled the canning jars, located the canning supplies and processed them. Those four-ish pounds of tomatoes only made four pint jars and a part of me wondered why I go to all the effort. We planted the seeds months ago. We watered and weeded and tended the garden all that time. And here now I was spending more time creating something that I could easily drive to the store and buy. It’s not even about saving money when you count the cost of the plants and the time spent.

Why? Why do I go to all the effort to can four jars of tomatoes to use this winter?

Photo by Sigmund on Unsplash

—

A day earlier Phil and I went to the store. It was a quick trip after dinner and back-to-school night at the elementary school. We needed milk for breakfast the next morning, which always leads to more purchases in the dairy aisle. This seems to be the reason we go to the store most often, to replenish things like milk, cheese and yogurt.

Only self-checkout lanes were open when we had finished our list. This is usually fine with me. I prefer the self-checkout most of the time, but I found it odd that there was no cashier working at all. Granted, it was late in the day and there are staffing shortages everywhere, but it almost felt eerie.

“This is how the robots take over,” I said to Phil as we crossed the parking lot. I was joking. I think. There’s a fine line sometimes between dark humor and cynicism and I don’t always know the difference.

As we watched baseball that night after the kids went to bed, a commercial came on for a rowing machine that offers picturesque backgrounds and encouraging coaches, the rowers’ answer to Peloton, I suppose.

“We’re never going outside again, are we?” I remarked. By “we” I meant “humanity.”

Now, let me be clear that I don’t find fault with anyone who buys and uses such a machine. I’m all for health and fitness however you can manage it. I use empty juice and milk jugs filled with water as my dumbbells because I hate the idea of going to a gym to work out and there was no weightlifting equipment available for purchase that was in my budget during the pandemic . When my kids were little and sometimes even now in the dead of winter or on a rainy day, I think I would give almost anything to have a treadmill or other kind of exercise equipment in our house. That we have neither the money nor the room for such a machine is only one obstacle. Personally, I prefer the outdoors, even when it’s cold and rainy.

Maybe humanity isn’t on the brink of collapse because of self-checkouts and virtual rowing machines, but in the midst of a pandemic (yes, we’re still in the midst of it), it’s not hard to imagine a world like this–where machines provide our connection to humans or replace them all together.

I don’t want to live in that world.

—

Photo by Iñaki del Olmo on Unsplash

I recently read Glennon Doyle’s latest book, Untamed, and there’s a lot I could say about it, but one of the chapters that stuck with me had to do with imagination. She says that when we look at the visible order of things happening around us–violence, injustice, that sort of thing–and believe there is a different way, that’s faith. “This is not how things are meant to be,” she writes. “We know that there is a better, truer, wilder way. … Perhaps imagination is not where we go to escape reality but where we go to remember it.”

I’m stuck on this idea that when we picture the world in a truer, more beautiful way we aren’t just daydreaming, we’re remembering.

She continues: “Let’s conjure up, from the depths of our souls: The truest, most beautiful lives we can imagine. The truest, most beautiful families we can fathom. The truest, most beautiful world we can hope for. Let’s put it all on paper. Let’s look at what we’ve written and decide that these are not pipe dreams; these are our marching orders. These are the blueprints for our lives, our families, and the world. May the invisible order become visible. May our dreams become our plans.”

—

This brings me back to the tomatoes and the canning and the virtual rowers. In the truest, most beautiful world I can imagine, humanity reconnects with the earth. There is something almost magical about growing a tomato then saving it in a jar for later. Tasting a canned tomato from summer in the middle of winter is a kind of remembering because no red-looking tomato in the store in December tastes as good as one fresh off the vine in August. 

“Ah, yes,” my tastebuds say. “This is what a tomato tastes like.”

Photo by Avin CP on Unsplash

Most of my food comes from a grocery store, it’s true, but sometimes I need to be reconnected to the source of that food. I need to go to the garden and pick the vegetables we eat for dinner. I need to know the farmer who raises the meat I eat. I need to learn where the food I buy comes from, what impact it has on the environment, how I can be a responsible consumer. I need to remember that food does not magically appear in the grocery store. That there is a long line of people involved in the process–from the grower to the picker to the factory worker to the trucker to the stocker.

And I need to see the world around me, not just in pictures and not just through my phone screen, but really see it. And smell it. And feel it. I can listen to the ocean waves through my earbuds and it calms me, but until I see it in person, I forget how vast the ocean is. How small I am. My soul is lifted by pictures of trees, of forests, but nothing compares to the damp, woodsy smell. How my lungs expand taking in the fresh, oxygenated air provided by the trees. When I walk through the woods, my feet remind my brain that this world is not new, that generations have walked these paths before, that we do not own the earth. The land does not belong to us, and how we use it says a lot about who we are.

Even “ordinary” woods are magnificent to me

When I touch the earth–balancing on a rock or running my hand through a stream or sifting through the soil–I remember that this place where I live, this planet that sustains life, is itself alive. And I have a responsibility to care for it.

In the most beautiful world I can imagine, humanity is in harmony with the earth. 

—

In this world I can imagine, I am a creator. Words become sentences become stories. And not as a commodity. At least, not just for that reason. In the truest, most beautiful world I can imagine, I create for the sake of creating.

Photo by Rachel Struve/Rachel Struve Photography

I think of this sometimes as I sit on the couch watching TV and completing cross-stitch patterns. I do this as a way to occupy my hands while I’m engaged in a screen, and because I like watching a blank canvas become something, little by little. I don’t create my own patterns or sell my creations. I’ve given a few away as gifts, but mostly I do cross-stitch just for the sake of doing it.

I do not yet see my writing this way, but I’m trying to imagine it.

Could I create a story for the sake of creating, without the expectation that it will someday be something to sell and market? (I don’t know if I can fully separate this latter thought from my writing because I still feel like writing is meant to be read.)

But like the canned tomatoes, there are easier ways to fulfill my need for story. Reading what other people have written is like buying canned tomatoes from the store. It’s more convenient than doing it myself.

But it’s not as fulfilling.

Something happens inside of me when I take that tomato off the vine and bring it into the kitchen, when I collect pounds of them and fill several jars with diced tomatoes. I feel good. Confident. Like I’ve tended something in my care and tended it well. Preserved it for the future.

Could I say the same for my words?

Could I pluck them out of my head and fill pages with them, preserving them for some future use? It takes more time and effort, yes, but something happens inside of me when I do it. It’s part of what makes me alive.

—

I know that for a lot of us, what we can see in the world right now doesn’t look true or beautiful. And that can cause despair. Or indifference. Sometimes it’s easier to look away than to look at the hard things directly. Sometimes it burns like when we stare at the sun.

But what if we looked at the world and said: It doesn’t have to be this way.

And if it doesn’t have to be this way, can we imagine the way it could be?

What kind of world can we picture when we let our imaginations run free?

And how can we make it so?