Beauty on the Backroads

Stories of grace for life's unexpected turns

summer

What we’ve been up to: yellow phase edition

Two weeks ago, our county moved to the yellow phase, which in our state still means we’re to take precautions but we’re not as limited to our homes, workplaces and essential errands. The transition hasn’t meant big changes for our family, and I’ve still been logging some of our activities just to remind myself how we spent these days.

Here’s a recap for you about what we’ve been up to.

Summer

Even though the official start of summer is a few days away, we’re in full summer mode here. As in, the kids don’t have any more school and we had to create a new routine to get us through these days so our brains didn’t melt from all the YouTube. I created a weekly checklist for the kids to complete. They each have a copy, and at the end of two weeks, they’ll get a reward of their choice. It’s going better than it was without the checklist but not always as great as I’d hoped. But they did help me clean the bathroom and weed the garden. We had our end-of-the-school-year dinner from Chipotle. We booked a cabin at a state park for later in July to take a short vacation because all of our previous vacation plans for the summer are not doable.

Garden

Things are growing! Including weeds! I have been out to weed the garden two or three times. We have speed mulch that we got free from someone’s yard that was mostly leaves and sticks and mulch that our neighbor who owns the business behind our house had his lawn company dump on our concrete slab. Phil built a trellis for our snap peas. I still worry that we put things in too late to have any chance at a good harvest this year. I transplanted two volunteer tomato plants. Two potato plants have popped above ground. It is consuming my time and attention and I’m not sorry.

Hiking

Weekly, we’re trying to get out of the house and take a hike. Without going too far from home because of bathrooms and such. One week, we went to Lancaster County Central Park and did a loop path that took us past a creek, under a covered bridge and into the woods.

Another week, we walked a paved path next to the Conestoga River.

Both took us nearly an hour and sometimes the kids complain about it, and it’s always a monumental effort to get out of the house. Always worth it, though.

Virtual adventures

During normal summers, we like to take day trip adventures because summer is when we have more family time as the four of us. This year, we decided to still try to have virtual adventures. So, we listed a bunch of places we wanted to “see,” wrote them on slips of paper and pulled one out of a hat. Our first adventure was to The White House. We wanted to explore online and make some kind of food related to the adventure, so our daughter created a White House themed menu based on some of the favorite foods of presidents. We had garlic butter steak bites (inspired by William Howard Taft’s love of steak), leather britches (green beans with bacon inspired by Andrew Jackson, with a side of commentary about the pitfalls of his presidency) and the Kennedy family brownies. We watched Inside The White House on Amazon Prime. Our next adventure is Sydney, Australia.

Our White-House-inspired meal

Books

Our son is back devouring the next Harry Potter book because he wants to earn the Lego Harry Potter video game. We placed a pickup order for the library.

Errands

We went to the school to pick up the kids’ things. They both saw their teachers. I also went to my school to pick up my personal things. And I cried the whole way home. My driver’s license expired during quarantine, and I was able to renew it online, but I still needed to get a new photo ID. All the PennDOT offices were closed until early June, and while I really wasn’t looking forward to venturing out, I did it and it wasn’t too bad. We also dropped off the library books we’d had for months. And Phil took our daughter to buy running shoes. He also returned our son’s lacrosse equipment.

Miscellaneous

I cut Phil’s hair one Sunday because it was getting too long for him to feel comfortable while working. I only do one style, though, so he’s rocking a new look that nobody hates.

Before
After

The kids needed new clothes for summer, so we shopped online. When it came, everything but one pair of shorts fit and that was only because the store had sent us the wrong size. I may never shop with the kids in a store again. And a friend came over for a (no, really!) socially distanced visit on my porch. We attended a socially distant prayer meeting for racial justice with people from church. And for one stretch of 24 hours, both Phil and I were puking because of something we ate, we think. It was not a fun time for us. We’ve been taking almost nightly walks through the neighborhood. And a house in a nearby development caught on fire one night and we watched the smoke billow from our porch. It was close enough that the air around our house was thick with smoke.

Not clouds; smoke from a nearby house fire

What we’ve watched

Some of these as a family, sometimes just as adults. Lego Batman. Just Mercy. Anne With An E. Poldark. Good Omens. Good Mythical Morning. Ultimate Tag. The Titan Games. The Big Flower Fight. The Office.

Noticing beauty

I was sitting on the porch one night reading and there’s a bunny that hangs around our yard. It hopped around the yard and paused on the side porch. I got up to go in for a drink or something and saw that something was underneath the bunny. Then 3 baby bunnies hopped out from under our porch and a total of 4 babies were feeding from their mama. I ran inside and said, “Come quickly but quietly.” The kids were not interested but Phil and I stood in the kitchen and watched this happen for a while. Then the mama got spooked and the babies hung out in the yard and I wanted to know where they were staying, but eventually we decided to leave them alone and stop watching. It was marvelous.

Running

And exercising. There’s been a lot of both. I’m working on a 90-mile challenge in 90 days, and I’m already a quarter of the way there. This is what that looks like.

So, what have you been up to?

Slow {A series of S-words, Part 1}

I woke up this morning feeling like someone had pressed the fast-forward button on my life. I’m old enough to remember that pressing the “FF>>” button on the VCR made the movie speed forward at an unnatural pace. Now, we can just skip to the scene we want via digital technology, but I digress.

School starts again in 12 days and I’m feeling pressed on all sides. We have to shop for supplies. And groceries. The house is in a constant state of disorder made worse by kids deciding to do things on their own like make muffins for breakfast and orangeade for afternoon snack. The laundry is piling up and I have writing assignments I’ve been neglecting.

It felt like every person who needed something from me, both in my house and outside of it, decided to contact me all in one day and I literally screamed as loud as my voice could manage while standing in the mud room.

It’s too much. And I am not enough.

Photo by Charlotte Coneybeer on Unsplash

—

We’ve managed a mostly laid-back, steady pace this summer. We’ve squeezed in some fun outings. We’ve slept in and taken our time getting going in the mornings. We’ve unapologetically spent whole days at home. When our weeks have been too full, we’ve given ourselves permission to skip or say “no.”

We’ve long known that we cannot do it all every summer. When we make our list in late May, we remind ourselves that we will not cross everything off of it. This is a target, a goal, a wish list, not a mandatory to-do. I cannot do summer full-speed-ahead, even when the activities we plan are fun and good.

Maybe that’s why I was surprised to feel like life was revving its engine after a long idle. Maybe it’s because it feels like I’m in the passenger seat, needing to strap in and hold on as some unknown driver presses the accelerator and we speed off toward some destination not of my choosing.

This is not how I want to live life.

And yet some of these things I have chosen. Some of them I can control.

—

The school year brings its own kind of chaos, but order returns to my days. I function best with a schedule that is more or less predictable, so putting the kids on the bus at the same time every day and picking them 7 or so hours later works for me.

That time in between is both a blessing and a curse. I want to use it well, so I’ve begun planning how that time will look. Without a plan, I end up watching Netflix for a whole day and wondering why I can’t get anything done. (Judge me not.)

I notoriously over-schedule myself, though. I want to fill all the blocks of time because then I’ll at least look like I’ve been productive. Unlike this summer when I cannot measure productivity in anything other than jars of pickles canned or meals prepared and consumed. (Illustration: I just took a several minutes break from writing this post to help my kids finish making orangeade from scratch. My life.)

In the summer, I try to cut away all the extra I can because having two kids home all day is a full-time job. (And don’t let anyone tell you different. If people can make a living watching other people’s kids for a living, then I’ll forever believe that being a stay-at-home mom is a j-o-b.)

And the first thing to go in the summer is my writing because it feels like less of a job than being a mom is. It brings in almost no income. It is an art and therefore feels selfish. No one is my writing “boss” but me and if I’m not going to push me to work, then no one is.

I’ve managed to squeeze in more writing this summer than other summers, but it’s not been easy. (It shouldn’t be easy, really.) I have to choose it over other things and that is true whether it is summer, fall, winter or spring. (Also, can we take note of how often I am using the word “squeeze” in this post?)

It is a hard thing to describe to people, how me saying “yes” to my writing and “no” to other things like being part of a church committee or a school group or getting a “real” job is the best choice. It doesn’t make sense to me either but I know it is what I am meant to do.

Knowing and doing don’t always match up.

—

Photo by Daniel Monteiro on Unsplash

The faster life swirls around me, the slower I want to go.

My son has this habit of throwing himself on the ground if we try to hurry him along for any reason, which annoys me to no end but he comes by it honestly.

The more I am told to “do,” the more I want to “be.”

This is not a narrative our culture wants to claim. Even in church, the one place I want to take a breather and slow down, I feel pressure to do more and be more. I cannot keep up this pace for six days a week, let alone seven.

When I went to a writing retreat in June, I was confronted with just how busy my life was by the absence of busy-ness. Our schedule was so open I did not know what to do with myself. The weekend was slow, almost to a stop, and my mind could not handle it. I had to convince myself that pulling a lawn chair under a tree overlooking the mountains of Virginia was a perfectly good way to spend an hour. No one interrupted me. No one questioned my choice. It was the most relaxing hour of my summer, I think.

It reminded me of the one time I practiced yoga. I could feel my body resisting it from the beginning, as if to protest: “Sit here? For 30 minutes? No! We need to GO!” My muscles quivered and my brain tried to come up with any reason to get up and leave the room. It was hard work, telling my body to stop moving so fast, and by the time it was over, I was the most relaxed I had ever felt. (Why then have I not joined a yoga class? I, too, want to know the answer.)

Slow is not the coveted prize in our culture. (Try driving the speed limit or less and see how frustrated people get. I’m one of them.) Wherever we’re going, whatever we’re doing, we have to get there yesterday and once we’re there, we’re on to something else.

Where does it end?

I am not an expert on slowdown, nor do I welcome a forced stop (illness, injury, crisis) in my life.

But if I can choose fast, can I not also choose slow?

Note: I did not set out to write a series, but I’ve been thinking about a post on silence for a while. Today, I needed to write one about slowing down, if only to force myself to sit for longer than five minutes. Next, I’ll write that one about silence. That may be all there is to the series unless something else needs attention.

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