with vision: reading with Grandma

Kav’s hair was all tufted and feathery-soft after his bath, copper in some lights and red in others. I sniffed him and ruffled it, and before I knew what I was saying, these words came out of my mouth:

“His hair is so pretty.” I paused. “Listen to me, I sound just like Grandma.”

with vision: reading with Grandma

For nineteen years Grandma has called our babies’ hair pretty, and she doesn’t care whether it’s a boy or a girl she’s crooning over. Anyone under ten is fair game.

The next day, we drove the wavy road to her house in forty degree weather. Puddles from the last few days’ rain on the roadside trail were still glazed with ice in the early afternoon, and you could see their frozen lines crisscrossed on their surface. If you grew up in cold weather, you can imagine the perfect crunch these puddles must make if you walked on them. But no one had walked on these ones yet; through miles of the road, they were all still untouched.

Forgive me for going on about the puddles. We’ve been listening to an audio version of Nicholas Nickleby on these drives between Wasilla and Palmer, and Dickens makes me verbose.

It’s a forty minute drive all the way past the river, and Kav’s tolerance for car rides usually expires around the 25-30 minute mark (I don’t think this is Dickens’ fault). So since we don’t make it over as often as we’d like, we planned a two-for-one-deal this time: Stop at Grandma’s house before heading to Dad’s, where the kids were going to rake leaves while Vin put the winter tires on the Stagecoach.

Grandma turned 88 this month. She’s been losing her vision for years; her peripheral vision is still good, but faces are hard to see and reading is almost impossible. She misses driving and seeing people, but she especially misses reading.

And she doesn’t like audiobooks and I don’t blame her; we both must have similar attention spans.

But I was praying about it the week before and an idea struck me, so I asked her about it that day:

What if we could read to her from home? What if we recorded some of our school readings out loud, and burned them to a CD, and gave her a new one every time we came over?

It would be different than a normal audiobook. It would be us in all our mess and glory – Finnegan’s interruptions, questions from the kids, babbling from Kav and meowing from the cats – and it would be less like being alone or being read to by some stranger (professional though they may be), and more like we’re there with her.

And she liked that idea. She also liked knowing that it would be help us with school, motivating the kids to practice reading aloud.

So we’ve been filling the Voice Memo app on my phone with chapters and we’re halfway through several books now…and so far, only one of them is interspersed with me bossing a toddler to stop jumping on the couch, stop wrestling with his baby brother, and stop driving his racecar over the cat.

See? Like I said, it’s just like we’re there.

I called her again a few days ago – her number is the only one I still dial because it hasn’t ever changed – and gave her an update on our progress. Who’s reading what, what’s almost done, which characters get silly voices.

“Some people are just readers,” she said. “Other people read with vision.”

And then she started telling me about when she was a kid. They had poor light in the evening but she read in it anyway; she needed glasses long before she got them, and maybe that’s at least partly why her vision is gone now.

“It was a different world. People will never know what a different world it was back then.” She talked about the rationing in World War II. Sugar was rationed; it was a rare occasion when you could go to the store and see bags of sugar on the shelf. Paper products were hard to come by.

So many things are ever so much better, she said. Our lighting is so much better now. People have no excuse for not being readers these days. It was an altogether different world then.

But that day when we visited, it was the normal, familiar world of Grandma’s house: We dropped off cookies, the boys used her recliner as a merry-go-round, and we fortified ourselves with hugs before heading to Dad’s for yardwork.

And when Finn went up to her for his hug, these words came out of her mouth:

“Look at you, and your pretty hair!” she said, running her fingers through his blond tufts. But we saw that coming, I guess.

growing through it: the fullness that comes after waiting

Well, friends, with the dry air and spring temps, there’s a new game here at the Lighthouse. It requires two people, or at the very least, an ornery human and an unsuspecting cat.

Here’s how you play: Create a charge by running your hands back and forth on the couch (or just sit there long enough to accidentally create friction), then touch someone within reach. If you induce a loud zapping sound, some screaming, and cause the other player’s hair to stand on end, you win.

growing through it: the fullness that comes after waiting

In the spirit of science and brotherly affection, one of our kids actually got a few siblings to hold hands together to see if the current would fly through the chain and nearly electrocute the person on the end. I’m happy to report that this has been unsuccessful so far, but we’re having people over soon and I suspect they may inadvertently participate in the troubleshooting process.

I’ve been going through an old journal as research for the next book – speaking of painful, healing, hilarious, and wretched experiments – and in retrospect I’ve noticed that particular season of our lives was not all that different from taking someone’s hand and getting electrocuted.

And really, I struggle with how to write about the hard situations when they involve others. It’s come up in conversation a few times recently with friends (and a husband) who are also writers – this quandary of sharing our story when it overlaps with the stories of others. I’ve prayed about it and here’s what God answered:

Write about your past as though you were now close to the people who caused the pain. Write about it as though the sins were atoned for – because they are – and as though the relationships were restored – which they can be, through surrender on both sides. You are only responsible for your own surrender, but you’re not off the hook for praying for theirs. Writing about your past in this way leads you to write the truth in love with compassion and maturity, as you should.

So there’s that, and we’ll see how it goes. Anne Lamott also gives hilarious and accurate advice in Bird By Bird, but I can’t quote it here because if I did your content filter would block my website.

But in the summer of 2013 there’s a journal entry where I wrote out Isaiah 55 in its entirety and what He was speaking to me through each verse. And one of the things He said was, You will tell people to spend time with Me, searching Me, being honest with Me in their day-to-day dilemmas and drudgery.

Several months later I started writing some of the earliest content for what became Oh My Soul, which wasn’t even birthed until a full five years after those earliest posts.

For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven
and do not return there but water the earth,
making it bring forth and sprout,
giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater,
so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth;
it shall not return to me empty,
but it shall accomplish that which I purpose,
and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it.

– Isaiah 55:10-11, ESV

Fullness takes time. The waiting is hard and there’s no substitute for steadfastness, for the grit it takes to hang on to His Word when nothing seems to reflect it in the reality you see.

There’s no substitute for the time it takes to grow through the process of living. In any given half-decade, we all go through loss – and gain – that we never could have anticipated, touching hands with many people. Some of them let go too soon and leave us grieving. Sometimes we’re the ones who let go after getting burned too many times. And other times, we hold on for dear life through all the mayhem – because these ones, they are our people.

If He had told us ahead of time the loss and gain we would experience in the last five years, we never would have believed Him. Sometimes keeping us in the dark is a mercy that helps us toward obedience. We are not simply unsuspecting victims; this unknowing is actively doing a work in us for good.

…Getting old is our secret weapon. Readers come to books for many reasons, but ultimately they’re looking for wisdom. That’s something writers can offer only after we’ve accrued it, like scar tissue, usually by surviving things we didn’t want to deal with—a process otherwise known as aging.

Barbara Kingsolver

And looking at it that way, I don’t really want to know what the next five years will hold. Just yesterday we lost someone we loved. And even though we knew it was coming, I’m not sure that grieving in advance makes it any easier, or if it just prolongs the process.

For you shall go out in joy
and be led forth in peace;
the mountains and the hills before you
shall break forth into singing,
and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.

– Isaiah 55:12, ESV

Life requires troubleshooting and the unknowing is unnerving. But the fullness that rewards us at the end of waiting only comes from learning from life’s friction instead of just getting burned by it.

We get to choose if we want to be more mature at the end of our hard times or not. You can tell the difference if you hold yourself to the same standard you set for those who hurt you, or if you make excuses for yourself without offering grace to others.

You can go through it or you can grow through it – we can learn the hard way, or not all.

Weeks after this game started, I’m still getting zinged from the couch several times a day, and more often than not it’s completely unintentional.

At the end of the night, I’m sitting on the couch with Bingley, and neither of us have learned our lesson. I reach down and barely touch him before zap – he gives me a black look. The tip of his ear is practically smoking and my finger is numb.

Like I said, you can learn the hard way, or not at all.

And I could tell you what he was probably thinking, but I’m pretty sure that would activate your content filter, too.

work in progress, part one: what happens when we fill the lake

Reagan is next to me, reviewing letter sounds. And not just that, but she’s also reviewing other important things, like how to pronounce “the” like thuh, not duh – and she plods through all of them in order: Thuh…E…says…ehh. Thuh…F…says…fff, and so on. It may be the first time in my life I’ve ever wished the English alphabet had less than 26 letters.

work in progress, part 1: what happens when we fill the lake

People often ask how we homeschool all these kids (“all these kids,” they say, as though we’ve collected them like so many postage stamps) and I hate to disappoint them, but the answer is pretty boring:

We don’t, really.

At least, not anymore. We put in our time with the older ones when they were younger, and now they mostly homeschool themselves; we just check and discuss their assignments and read with them a little. Life is all learning, of course, but as far as school goes, they’re pretty independent now.

So school-wise we direct our efforts to working with the Littles, as far as they will cooperate, which is…ah, how do I put this…extremely variable. And if you know us, you know that the category of “Littles” has less to do with age and more to do with ability and maturity. Our big kids are 18, 15, almost 13, and 9; our Littles are 13, 13, 3, and 2 months. Our 18-year-old recently moved out, and our little Kavanagh is just learning to take the world in. He’s growing like a weed; he smiles and laughs. Which might all be the same thing.

Last month I made filling the lake a priority again, and it’s working. I’m remembering that this is why we chose to write from home full time: I feel alive again when that’s what I’m actually doing, as opposed to the administrative, publishing parts that consume certain phases of it.

When we like what we’re doing, we forget that we’re working.

I like the movement of standing up to reach over the back of my laptop to grab a favorite style guide from my stack of writing books on the back of my desk. And I like having a row of finished works next to them, and different notebooks and journals scattered all over the place.

I like that one of the works-in-progress is not just a digital file like the one I’m currently typing on, but it’s a stack of research materials, a notebook, and Oh My Soul and its companion journal. Eric Liddell said he felt God’s pleasure when he ran; I feel God’s pleasure when I am in full nerd-mode with a pencil behind my ear, going through familiar books, rifling through pages and marking up passages, and typing as the words flow easy, fast, and furious.

And I even kind of like it – in a perverse, self-flagellating way – when I am in front of the laptop with no words, frustrated with the wrong words, and aggravated as all get out trying to pull a piece together before a deadline when the clock is ticking down (like right now, she thought nervously), because I know the thrill of accomplishment and relief when it’s done.

I don’t love it so much that I forget that I’m working, but I know that it’s worthwhile because whatever I’m doing is working. Purpose comes easier when we see the headway we’re making.

Like when Reagan pushes through and makes it to Thuh Z says zzz – it’s progress, and she is gaining. In the effort and aggravation, we see achievement and increase, and it’s worth it. You know, sort of like childbirth: Ta da, look, we did it. We made this.

The other day one of my kids asked me for harder books, but she didn’t say it that way. She said she wanted “books that would take longer than a day to read” and I had the happy task of going through the library with her to find a new stack that would keep her occupied. She didn’t want The Hunger Games, she wanted the challenge: The Scarlet Pimpernel, Mother Mason, My Antonía.

And this is when I love homeschooling and forget that it, too, is work: Learning, like teaching or writing or any other job, ceases to be work when we get lost in it.

Along those lines, this month I got to dig into the first chapters of Bleak House with my writing student. I almost wrote “dive” into it, but no, one does not dive into anything of Dickens. You wade in cautiously, stir a foot around the water to check for sharp objects, and, finding none, keep going deeper and deeper until you’re surrounded by 43 characters swimming around and splashing you in the face and pulling you under, and you like it. At least, I do.

And I might as well confess up front that I’m already reading Pickwick Papers with Iree and Nicholas Nickleby (one of my favorites) with the family as a read aloud. So, no, I didn’t pick Bleak House, but I’ve read it before and was thrilled that my student chose it.

Each of us read from our own copies. I leaned over to see where she was at, and she was a full page ahead of me, because I had gotten lost in sentences like,

Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.

And I forgot I was supposed to be working.

So now I find myself in the middle of three, count ‘em, three Dickens novels, and perfectly happy about it. Vin thinks I might have issues. I think I might want to be a Dickens scholar when I grow up…and that, too, might be the same thing.

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