gratitude

Anniversary (a spiritual journey)

/ Fran Haley / 8 Comments

Today I dug deep in the trunk and pulled out the album.

The cover is age-blemished. Pages yellowing. The cards are fragile, antiquated. The inked signatures, along with the love and best wishes, are fading.

On this day, forty years ago, my dress was ready and hanging on the closet door. My mother paid $130 for it and repaired the uneven hem. We’d found a cathedral bridal cap on the clearance rack, the price reduced because the pearl beading was coming off—she bought that, too, and restitched the tiny beads.

When Grandma offered to pay for the wedding cake, my mother wept.

My mother-in-law had new carpet installed in her home just prior to hosting the rehearsal dinner. She made spaghetti. A widow of eleven years, she’d given her engagement ring to her boy, to give to me. She cried on the morning of our wedding because it was raining, but the sun broke through the clouds in all its summer glory before the ceremony. The following spring, she would remarry.

My father asked a coworker, an amateur photographer, to take pictures. Our next-door neighbor, whose three kids my mother babysat for years, hosted my shower and provided the refreshments for the reception.

My grandmother asked her sister to stay with my grandfather, who was ailing and not up to traveling three hours in a car (cancer would make itself known and his bladder would be removed; he would live another fourteen years). Grandma was determined to be there. One of my most treasured photos from that day is of her seated on a pew alongside my Grannie and my mother, all of them smiling, wearing matching white carnation corsages.

My mother made the four ocean-blue bridesmaid’s dresses; my sister and new sister-in-law were radiant in them. Mom also made my sky blue going-away outfit and, at the last minute, removed her white beads and put them around my neck. The final photos in my wedding album are of her in her handmade pink dress, minus the beads, watching me leave, and my father standing in his black tails and striped ascot, grinning from ear to ear, a big cigar clenched in his teeth (congrats, Daddy; your eldest is safely handed off, not your responsibility anymore).

I was twenty years old.

I loved them all. I knew they loved me.

My family.

Forty years later, I remember them, despite the unraveling. The irreparable rifts. Death, loss, mental illness, addiction, estrangement, falling away… the story is surreal. Nightmarish. Like something from Picasso’s blue period with Van Gogh’s cypresses lurking in the foreground.

But on that bright day, we were together, celebrating. I read every faded, fragile card and my own handwritten record of the events. So much hope and joy, all there, preserved. For a few moments I linger in the vibrance, the whole wide circle of family love, everything that culminated in this new beginning. I remember my mother’s sacrifices especially.

And so the prologue ended. There are pangs, yes. Shatterings and shards in the heart. But the love is there. Still there. Despite all.

I poured my life into chapters that wrote themselves across the four subsequent decades, into the husband, the ministry, the children and now grandchildren, that God has granted me. As my husband said in the CICU to our oldest son, after regaining conscious from induced hypothermia, recovering from his first heart attack, cardiac arrest, and surgery: I have poured everything I have into you.

Duty. Sacrifice. For better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, until death do us part.

And so I made my vow, not only to a once-young man but to God, who loves with a steadfast love, from everlasting to everlasting.

Today my dress is ready and hanging on the closet door. Ivory with lace sleeves. Not new, but it’ll work. Tomorrow our family—our sons, daughters-in-law, granddaughters—will gather to celebrate this milestone with us.

I shall tell them, as best I can, that they’re infinitely more than what I dreamed of when I first set my satin-slippered foot on this path, forty years ago. Gifts beyond compare. Love multiplied, exponentially.

Straight from the hand of my Lord, who makes all things new.

I close my album.

with special thanks to the insightful band of Spiritual Journey writers and to this month’s host, Leigh Anne Eck, who chose the topic of “family.”

Thank you, Writing Community

/ Fran Haley / 32 Comments

Dear TWT Writing Community,

On this next-to-last day in the March Slice of Life Story Challenge, I want to tell you what a profound gift you are.

Thank you…

For sharing your heart and your stories…some of which were difficult to share.
For standing by one another, offering solace, healing, and love, which helped to fill a crack or two in life’s broken places.
For sticking with challenge, knowing it fosters growth.
For stretching your writing wings as far as they’ll go, and discovering that, yes, you can fly.
For being a warrior angel on occasion, ready to defend a fellow writer wounded by the world.
For taking us places we’ve never been, and may not ever see, otherwise.
For sparking new insights, new tastes, new things to try, new goals…for keeping life fresh.
For celebrating the joys in each others’ lives.
For your humor.
For your sorrow.
For your courage.
For your encouragement.
For believing in yourself.
For believing in me.
For pulling each other onward and through.

I’ll say it again: I did not believe I had the stamina for the daily writing challenge this year. I decided not to do it.

Until the morning of Day One, when I woke up ridiculously early with my starved inner writer tapping on my heart…Hello! Hello! You cannot wait for sustenance. Seek it, and it will come. Open up! You will reget it if you don’t…

How right is my inner writer. Always.

Sigh.

I didn’t feel like writing, but I wrote. And kept on writing. Every single day.

YOU are the reason.

I drew energy and strength from you. From your comments, from your stories, from your experiences…from the sense of belonging, from the mutual desire to build each other up, from valuing and being valued by each other.

Writing is one thing; writing in community is everything.

Don’t we know it.

How much richer is my life, because of these last thirty days.

We are a shared story.

Thank you for every minute, every word.

I am so grateful.

Here’s to one day more ❤

Fran

*******
in honor of my fellow “Slicers” in the Two Writing Teachers March Slice of Life Story Challenge

Strewn with loss

/ Fran Haley / 33 Comments

Yesterday I wrote to the WordPress daily prompt on fate/destiny.

Today’s prompt:

What experiences in life helped you grow the most?

Loaded question.

My title today comes from a line I wrote in yesterday’s post. Will this be my pattern every day I take on the Slice of Life Story Challenge? Don’t know. We shall see.

As to this prompt about experiences…

Doesn’t most growth come from a place of pain?

*******

Dear Mom:

Someday I will do a better job of writing about this than what I am about to do now, but here goes.

I understand you have died. About a year ago.

I’ve not been able to find your obituary anywhere, nor your grave. Your plate on the headstone beside Daddy’s remains blank. My guess is that things were kept private, simple, as inexpensive as possible.

After twenty-three years without any contact, I have a few questions, but not much to say.

I have to say it, even though you’ll never know.

I got over my anger long ago. I had to, or it would have consumed me. I had young children of my own to care for; they were my priority. I now have two beautiful granddaughters. Your great-granddaughters, who will ask for the story, someday.

I got over my fear of your destructive behavior, which marked Daddy’s last years, and which shattered our family. I know it continued because, every so often in the ensuing decades, debt collectors would call my house looking for you. I would tell them the truth: I had no contact with you.

The pattern would not be broken, but people would. There could be no going back. Only forward.

I am past the point of blaming. We make our own choices. We paint our narratives in the colors of our liking, to our own purposes. To keep living with ourselves, I suppose, instead of changing. I chose the filter of Fact. Grannie once told me that she didn’t believe in divorce but she had to do it to survive your violent father. I didn’t believe in cutting ties with my own mother, either, but I had to do it, to survive. In the better part of you – for it was surely still there, somewhere – you would have understood this.

But I am not writing to justify or to judge. It’s not my place. It doesn’t matter now, anyway.

What I want to say is thank you.

Thank you for every sacrifice you made throughout my childhood. You did so much with so little.

Thank you for the sewing machine running late in the night, making our beautiful clothes.

Thank you for playing gospel records that I listened to when I was supposed to be asleep, and for the way you could paint and repair most anything.

Thank you for your humor and your unbridled cackling, contagious laughter; no one else laughed like you.

Thank you for being a safe haven for kids of troubled families in the neighborhood as well as for our neighbor who suffered a nervous breakdown. I see her frantic blue eyes, even now. Thank you for inviting the meanest bully of all to my birthday party without telling me, because you saw a child who was hurting inside, who needed to be part of something happy.

Thank you for advocating (surely, as I can’t imagine it was Daddy’s idea), to get my pet parakeet, and later for the puppies (which he forbade, to no avail; you won out).

Thank you trying to save my sick kitten, Edelweiss, which died in your hands while you tried to feed her with an eyedropper.

Thank you for your incredible creativity, the way you could whip up a costume like magic, and for coming so proudly to my school plays, your sisters in tow.

Thank you for pulling my wedding together, for mending the gown and veil from the discount racks so they’d be presentable, for weeping with sheer relief when Grandma offered to pay for the cake, and for making my all my bridesmaid dresses and my sky-blue going-away outfit. I recall you saying you were married in a blue dress; you didn’t have a wedding gown. And thank you for removing the iridescent white beads you wore to my wedding, pulling them off your neck to put around mine at the last minute, to set off that sky-blue dress as I was leaving.

I bet you thought I’d forgotten, all these long years since.

I have not. I remember it all.

As I said, one day I’ll write about it better than I can right now.

Just one more thing, as I sit by the window on this bright day, with winter fading and spring stirring in a wild dance of golden light and flickering shadows across my kitchen walls and floors: Thank you for taking me to church when I was a child. When I lost you to the darker part of yourself, I still had the church. The faith. The Lord. This has been my life. This has been the life of my family.

You might have forgotten many things. I might be one of them. I will never know.

But it’s okay. I choose to remember the good bits of you reflected in every shard I salvage from this story strewn with loss, set in motion long before I was ever in the world.

Some will say how sad, that no one ever never reached across the abyss to make amends.

I do not say this. I say it is over. The abyss is closed. Filled in. Time takes us all. The hurt is gone, although the healing will never be complete in this life.

I carry the shards.

Peace to you at long last, Mom.

P.S. I dreamed of you awhile back. Small and white-haired, but you looked well. You held your arms out to me in welcome.

“My baby has come home,” you said.

And I hugged you.

Because it was finally safe to love you again.

*******

with thanks to Two Writing Teachers for the annual March Slice of Life Story Challenge.
This is my ninth year participating alongside fellow teacher-writers,
as a means of continually honing the craft.

To those of you out there dealing with loss, death or otherwise:
Writing brings clarity.
Writing in community builds courage.

Write your story and trust.

Three song

/ Fran Haley / 7 Comments

for my granddaughter

When I tell you your story
in all the years to come
you will remember
bits and pieces
on your own

because Three
records memory

I will tell you of these days
my own autumn
in which you paint
infinite points of opal-fire
against charcoal-ash sky

because Three
is alchemy

I will tell you how my heart sings
at sight of you running
as hard as you can
your little arms held out
to me, to me

because Three
is utter glee

And I will tell you how I listen
as still as I can be
when you sing snippets
of hymns…
oh, always, always abide with me

beautiful Three
ever holy

love you forever, Micahroni – Franna

*******

with thanks to Linda Mitchell for hosting Spiritual Journey Thursday writers with this invitation: “As we enter Native American Heritage Month I ask that you respond to Joy Harjo’s Fall Song in any way that makes your heart happy.”

Our two granddaughters make my heart and Grandpa’s as happy, and as awed, as they have ever been. We pray thanksgiving every day.

Easter echoes

/ Fran Haley / 20 Comments

Easter morning. I am six. My little sister is four. We’ve torn apart our Easter baskets. The green plastic grass is strewn all over and we’ve eaten the heads off our hollow chocolate bunnies. We didn’t go to church because Mama isn’t feeling well. She has trouble with her back and sits in traction for a while every day, in a chair by the bedroom with her chin in a sling that hangs from the top of the door. I am in the kitchen when the phone rings and she comes to answer it.

Oh no, she says. Oh, no. She starts to cry. Tears stream down her cheeks.

Listening to her side of the conversation with her friend from church, I learn that our pastor died this morning. At church. Standing at the pulpit to give his sermon when he sank to the floor. People thought at first he was kneeling to pray, strange for a Baptist, but…it is Easter…

In the days to come, the church people will comfort each another by saying this is exactly how he’d have wanted to go.

*******

Easter morning. I am eighteen. I’m not in church. I quit going a few years ago. I have been cutting my college classes more and more to run with my colorful theater crowd. I’ve decided to make my living perfoming on stage. It’s all I care about. My aunt, Mama’s sister who never married nor had children, says I’m “caught between the moon and New York City.” Deep down I know this is not the best that I can do: I don’t want to be at home anymore, I’m not getting along with my father, my grandmother is worried about me. I know she prays, because…

I have lost my way.

*******

Easter morning. I am nineteen. I am not in church, but I’m looking at a card that arrived at the end of the week. A beautiful Easter card from Miss Margaret. I didn’t know she had my address. I met her during my recent hospital stay, when I ran a high fever with a virus and needed an IV. Miss Margaret was my roommate. A large Black lady with a beautiful smile and a voice as warm as as a blanket. She was in for a mastectomy. She’d asked me, just before I left and before she went for surgery: Do you go to church?

No, ma’am, not like I should…(I didn’t say not at all).

Hmm, she replied. That young man who’s come to see you. Brought you those flowers. Have you been going out with him for long?

No, ma’am. I haven’t been out with him at all yet, actually. I got sick on the day of our first date and ended up here instead…it was also opening night of the play we were both in and I missed that, too.

What I didn’t tell Miss Margaret is that I was afraid the guy would give up on me…but he hadn’t, yet.

She nodded. Listen to me, Child. You are young. Watch out for yourself, hear? He seems a nice young man. You ought to get yourself back to church.

So here I am on Easter morning, not in church, looking at this card she mailed me… an Easter prayer signed Love and Blessings Always from Miss Margaret, P.S. I’m doing fine.

II wonder: Is it too late to get to church today?

I call my boyfriend.

*******

Easter morning. I am twenty-one. I’ve come back to my childhood church with my husband…the guy who didn’t give up on me when I got sick and missed our first date as well as opening night of the community theater production we were both performing in…a play entitled “Whose Life Is It Anyway?” We’ve been married for a year and a half, we’re both working, we just left our one-bedroom apartment for a new townhouse, first time homeowners. Up until these last months, we thought we would move to New York and pursue acting careers. I’ve been accepted to The American Academy of Dramatic Arts and they have allowed me a grace period to come….if we can figure out how we are going to afford to live there.

But my husband has recently told me: Honey…we need to talk.

And then he just says it: I know God’s calling me to preach.

His beautiful face is so earnest. I tell him the only thing I know to say: If He’s really calling you, then you have to try.

The huge sanctuary is packed today. Hundreds of people. The pastor has been here for fifteen years, the successor of the one who died here on that long-ago Easter morning. Today he preaches from Acts 17, Paul addressing the Areopagus on the resurrection of Christ; Paul is mocked, but one man and one woman are called out here in the passage by name for joining him in belief: Dionysious and Damaris.

When the pastor offers the invitation, I grab my husband’s hand: We are rededicating our lives today.

We walk the aisle. In all that crowd, we are the only ones who do: One man, one woman.

I tell my pastor that my husband is called to preach.

He will take him under his wing, the fifty-third and final young man he ordains to the ministry.

He will tell us later: It won’t be easy; I had to step into the pulpit of a man who died there. But the Lord will provide. He always comes through…sometimes at last minute when you are thinking all is lost, but He always comes through.

Then he’ll look at me: You were in my teen Bible School class, I recall. It’s been a while. I remember you coming to church with your mother when you were a child. Your dad didn’t attend and your mother didn’t drive.

Yes, sir. That’s right. My dad works most Sundays. Mama didn’t drive. She’s just recently gotten her license.

He will nod: You walked to church until we got our bus ministry started. Your mother was the first person to sign up for it.

I didn’t know that.

*******

Easter morning. I am twenty-five. Life is a blur with a baby boy to care for. I meant to change the old wreath hanging on the front of the parsonage, over by the wide porch swing. When the weather is warmer I will sit here and sing to him, but right now it’s still a little chilly, with the beach breezes blowing up from the bay. Before we go to church, I will put up the Easter wreath. Better late than never.

When I reach for the tattered old wreath, a bird flies out, startling me. There’s a nest in it, with babies cheeping… I had no idea.

Awed by the discovery of brand-new life on this particular morning, I let it be.

I save the new Easter wreath for next year.

*****

Easter afternoon. I am thirty. My family is gathered at the Baptist church in Daddy’s hometown for the funeral of his sister, my aunt. She was fifty-four, spent the last years of her short life in a nursing home, bedridden with mutliple sclerosis. For all of these years my grandmother drove a sixty-mile round trip each week to visit, taking her daughter’s soiled laundry home and returning it fresh and clean, and trimming her nails because the nursing staff said they weren’t allowed to.

Beside her in the pew, Daddy is pale. He’s recovering from a heart attack and four bypasses.

When my husband and I followed the limo to the church, I could see Daddy and Grandaddy in the back of it, side by side…two silver heads, exactly alike.

Grandma is broken but her faith is not. She says, I’m truly glad she isn’t suffering any more but oh, it hurts. It hurts.

She died on Good Friday, Grandma, I tell her. Like Jesus.

Grandma looks at me a long moment, her watery blue eyes gleaming: I can’t belive I haven’t thought of that.

The service begins. On Grandma’s other side, Granddaddy bows his head. Tears are trickling down his cheeks.

This is the only time I’ve ever seen him cry.

*******

Easter morning. I am thirty-seven. My husband and our boys have only been in our new house for a month and I’m still scrambling to get organized. I love the house, not that I wasn’t grateful for parsonages having been provided all these years, it’s just that eventually we will retire and you can’t do that in a parsonage. Plus…I can’t say exactly why, but this place somehow reminds me of my grandparents’ home. The great irony being that they’ll never see it. None of my childhood family will. Granddaddy’s been gone four years. Grandma’s in the nursing home; she’ll never travel again. Daddy died suddenly seven months ago and I’m still trying to process it, especially since everything fell apart with my mother afterward and there will be no repairing the ripping apart of our family…I think about how she took me and my sister to church…how she was the first person to sign up for the bus ministry…I have to remember the good, I must choose to remember the good, for it was there and real and even though a person may be destructive with those wheels already in motion long before she brings you onto the planet, there were always good things.

I cannot dwell on this anymore, I have two children of my own to get ready for church now and Easter is our biggest day…it really won’t do for the preacher’s wife to be late. Again.

*****

Easter morning. Today. Let’s just say my fifties will soon be coming to a close. Depending on when you read this, I will either be headed to church or having returned home. My husband is still preaching. Our oldest is in his fifth year of pastoring a church nearby, close enough that our two granddaughters come over often, including these past couple of days, to play with their Franna. Our daughter-in-law is an extraordinary pastor’s wife and mother as well as an incredible artist. So many gifts. Our youngest is playing piano for today’s worship service and he’ll sing the solo for the choir on “Rise Again” in his beautiful, beautiful voice… his fiancee is deeply compassionate, loving, always smiling. They are happy. Yesterday I wrote of digging the past and mining your memories for the stories that matter…today I write, my heart overflowing with abundance of life, for now, now, now. Today I write of the peace that passes understanding, for with God, the story does not end. The message of Easter that echoes through the ages is not one of death, but of life; not of lost causes, but of new purpose; not of despair, but of overcoming…it is a message of redemption, sacrificial love, forgiving, being set free. I think of those words, rise again, as I drive out of my neighborhood to see a hawk take flight, the morning sun flashing on its white belly, and discovering, that same day, the house finches have, indeed, built a new nest in the front door wreath, despite last year’s tragedy of all five babies dying suddenly. The mother began laying eggs during Holy Week.

Five of them.

The father sang a beautiful song after each egg was laid.

A song of new life, hope, and joy.

I know it so, so well.

The echoes of Easter.

*******

Composed for the 31st and last day of the Slice of Life Story Challenge with Two Writing Teachers

—thank you all for being such a loving, supportive community;
please keep writing ❤

Home poem

/ Fran Haley / 16 Comments

For today’s Open Write on Ethical ELA, participants are invited to write poems about “places we call home”.

Nothing pulls on the heart like home… I can almost hear the Beatles’ song “In My Life” playing in the background: “There are places I remember all my life, though some have changed…” The memory of these places, and the spirit of them, really are the theme song of our lives.

Of all the places I remember and could write about…have written about…I choose my home now. I have lived here the longest. I became a grandmother here. I have learned a lot more about savoring here. Usually I try to make my poem title do more work, but today, no other will do. 

Home

In the first moments
of pale-pink light
the big brown rabbit
comes from the woods
to nibble away
at the clover

in the ever-thickening branches
of the crape myrtle
my husband and planted
years ago
I can spot hummingbirds
hiding among the leaves
always alone
never together 

they dart, one by one
to the kitchen-window feeder

silvery-green females
perfect, pure
ethereal as fairies

a male, ruby fire at his throat
(brighter than the cardinal-flame
landing over on the fence)
impossible greens and turquoise 
shimmering on his back

unaware of his utter tininess
he sometimes perches
atop the feeder
as if to say I am King
of this Water-Mountain

a pair of doves feeds
on the ground by the tree line
then takes flight on pearly wings
vanishing in the pines and sweetgums
where their nest is secreted

robins, robins everywhere
just last week
a speckled fledgling on the back deck
both parents in the grass
chirping ground-control instructions

the mockingbird in the driveway
strutting and stretching his banded wings
as if he knows how legendary he is

a trill of finch-song from a nearby tree
so plaintive I fear my heart may burst

and the bluebirds
oh the bluebirds

if only I spoke green language
I would explain that I removed their house
from the back deck 
because it is about to be torn down

that I waited
until their unexpected second brood
flew out into the world

never imagining these parents
would return to the empty rail corner
a day or two later
clearly so puzzled
to find their house gone…

if I were the hermit wizard-woman
of this semi-enchanted nook
(as I sometimes pretend to be)
I would have known what to do

but my unmagical self did my best:
placing the birdhouse atop
the old wooden arbor
built by my oldest
when he was a boy

well away
from the impending deck destruction

and to my astonishment
the bluebirds have followed
their home

I do not yet know
if more eggs have been laid
in the house relocated
to the arbor

but as evening draws
and the pine-shadows fall
across the arbor
and the crape myrtle
and the big brown rabbit
back in the clover
and the old dog’s grave
and the old deck
about to be made new

I ponder
my length of time on this Earth
and the continuous carving-out
of home
how it goes on and on

a path forever unfolding before me
that I must follow

like the doe in the little clearing
across the road
pausing for one long moment
with her two fawns
before disappearing
in the leafy green

One fawn has already been ushered across

*******

with thanks to Ethical ELA and Two Writing Teachers
for the inviolable, invaluable writing spaces
and the inspiration

Today I dance: Spiritual Journey

/ Fran Haley / 11 Comments

with thanks to my Spiritual Journey writer-friends who gather on the first Thursday of each month, and to Chris Margocs for leading today with the theme of “Shall we dance?”

Today my heart dances. Even as I write these words, I am preparing to attend a chapel service in which my firstborn will be honored. He completed a Master of Divinity degree last December and the seminary faculty selects one graduate for the Pastoral Leadership award. My son was chosen.

Today, with the Spiritual Journey theme of Shall we dance, I recall Miriam, the sister of Moses. In Exodus 15:20-21 she led the women in a victory dance, echoing her brother’s song of praise to God for salvation from Pharaoh’s army in the miraculous parting of the Red Sea:

I will sing unto the Lord, for he has
triumphed gloriously;
the horse and his rider he has
thrown into the sea.

The Lord is my strength and my song,
and he has become my salvation;
this is my God, and I will praise him,
my father’s God, and I will exalt him.
(Exodus 15:1-2)

Today I think about the journey my husband and I have made. We’d been married less than two years when we rededicated our lives to God and my husband became a pastor. I was twenty-two; he was twenty-five. So much story to tell…all these years later, I stand in awe of the sustaining hand of God and His wondrous provision, grace, and mercy.

Our son named his firstborn daughter Micah, which means Who is like God? Answer: No one. And our little Micah, age eighteen months, loves nothing better than music and dancing. Except maybe food…

Today is a day of victory and praise for all that God has done, and continues to do, in the life of my family.

Today I dance…

I offer it in the form of a pantoum.

Dance, dance, dance!
Who is like God?
No one. No one.
He is beside you, behind you, before you.

Who is like God?
In the giving and forgiving
He is beside you, behind you, before you.
None of the sacrifices

in the giving and forgiving
of all your beloveds
—none of the sacrifices
can do for you what God has done.

Of all your beloveds
no one, no one
can do for you what God has done—
dance, dance, dance!

/

Blessing

/ Fran Haley / 19 Comments

noun

a favor or gift bestowed by God, thereby bringing happiness.

—Dictionary.com

*******

I could hardly wait to get home yesterday to check the progress of the new finch nest on my door wreath.

On Day Two, it now has the characteristic cup shape. It’s lined with white fuzz, a soft cushion for the precious eggs to come.

It is comprised almost exclusively of fresh green grass. The color of newness and life.

House finches are said to represent new beginnings.

Their nests always fill me with awe, and never more than now, watching the parents working together to rebuild immediately after two of their babies died in the previous nest, which I tore down. Confession: I wasn’t sure I was doing the right thing. Nature is mighty, ever-resilient, wise; it is imbued with regenerative power. Yet there are so many delicate balances within it. I didn’t want to upset any of these. I am a mere student of these birds. They are the experts.

So to see this nest being built in the exact spot as the ill-fated former one is a gift. It sends my spirits soaring, exponentially.

House finches are considered symbols of joy. If you ever hear one singing, you understand why.

In some parts of the world, they’re called the blessing bird.

They chose my door years ago as the place to bring new life into the world. I now share the wonder of it with my seven-year-old granddaughter, our “nurture scientist.” Together we have witnessed the miracle of tiny life coming into existence and eventually taking flight. In a couple more seasons, her baby sister will be able to enjoy it, too.

After I took this photo of the new nest, rejoicing and wondering when the first egg will appear, I went into the house to find a mysterious package my husband had retrieved from the mailbox.

Neither of us had ordered anything.

Curious.

I opened it…

A gift from a friend I met through writing, who reads about my finches each spring, who knows of the recent loss.

I am awed again.

A writing community is like a nest: a safe place especially created for growth, where we nurture one another and encourage each other to stretch our wings and fly.

It is here that we learn the true power of story and how it knits our hearts together. In the beginning, in the end, we are story.

To live it, write it, build it together, is a gift.

And the time for doing it is now. Today.

My love for the finches, like my love for writing, is inextricably woven through and through with gratitude for the blessings in my life. It’s all a song in my heart, greater than words.

Each day brings its own gifts. It’s up to us to see them, accept them, celebrate them.

And to give in return.

Beyond the horizon
Lies infinite possibility
Eyes cannot see.
Sky meeting sea
Sea meeting sky…
I fly ever onward
Nested and rested in the
Giver of every good and perfect gift.

Today, there might be an egg.

********
with thanks to Two Writing Teachers for the monthlong Slice of Life Story Challenge

and my dear gift-giver

Eavesdropping

/ Fran Haley / 13 Comments

a pantoum

Under the eaves
a porch
on the porch
a chosen door

a porch
sanctuary
a chosen door
from the other side, I hear

sanctuary:
father finch feeding nesting mother
from the other side, I hear
a song of love

father finch feeding nesting mother
on the porch
a song of love
under the eaves

Short clip of my house finches, which return every spring to nest in my door wreath (the finches don’t know that I purposely put out the twiggy grapevine wreaths they like best). Crank the volume to hear their beautiful voices. You might even catch a glimpse of wings as the father flies off to fetch more food for the mother. He will feed her until their little blue eggs hatch and then they’ll both feed their babies. In listening, it’s easy to understand how “charm” became the collective noun for finches and why they are said to symbolize joy.

House finches have an interesting history. From the Audubon Field Guide:

“Adaptable, colorful, and cheery-voiced, House Finches are common from coast to coast today, familiar visitors to backyard feeders. Native to the Southwest, they are recent arrivals in the East. New York pet shop owners, who had been selling the finches illegally, released their birds in 1940 to escape prosecution; the finches survived, and began to colonize the New York suburbs. By 50 years later they had advanced halfway across the continent, meeting their western kin on the Great Plains.”

also this, from the House Finch Overview, Cornell Lab of Ornithology:

“House Finches feed their nestlings exclusively plant foods, a fairly rare occurrence in the bird world.”

These are things I have learned. I continue to learn the lessons of the finches as they fill my home and heart to overflowing with a rare, almost-otherworldly joy.

House Finch mosaic. wolfpix. CC BY-ND 2.0.

*******

with thanks to Two Writing Teachers for the monthlong Slice of Life Story Writing Challenge

Goals

/ Fran Haley / 2 Comments

What shall I say of my goals, as the year comes to its close?

I had a few. Some I accomplished. Some I didn’t. A few were work-related. Most were not. These I never articulated; they were just on my heart every day, from my rising to my sleeping.

That’s the thing about goals: personal commitment-keeping. They’re desires of your own heart. Aspirations. No can set them for you. They come from within. They become your own bar to reach, for the stretching of your own wings, as far as you wish. The extent of your growth is up to you.

I learned much by watching birds this year. This was an unplanned goal. One hummingbird materializing by the pines in my backyard, hovering long enough for me to take note, led to the purchase of a hummingbird feeder (and another, as more hummers appeared) and an incessant thirst to know more about these endlessly fascinating creatures. Day by day, my sense of awe deepened.

Awe is a vital element for vibrant life in this world. I looked for it and it found me. Like that hummingbird. For two years running, awe has been my guiding idea-word and its payoff, beyond compare. I find it everywhere but not in everything. Not in material things, for they never fully satisfy and pursuit of them potentially enlarges the void. In my previous post I wrote about the universe being a dark place (check out the jellybean analogy from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics). Yet there is light. I am awed by the stunning brightness of the planets each night; Jupiter, Mars, and Saturn have become like family. I’m always looking for their return. They inspire the same thirst in me as the hummingbirds: can I get closer to them, know more about them, learn from them?

In the end awe, for me, is about the divine design of things, the Creator’s reflection in the created. There are intrinsic, intricate, infinite lessons to learn and my time above the Earth’s crust grows shorter. There’s a sacred interconnectedness to it all… from a solitary hummingbird to the solar system to the scent of baking bread to the ability to love and be loved and my own DNA so evident in my baby granddaughter’s face… every particle a poem, a song, a ribbon of light.

My ultimate goal for every day is to keep myself open for awe and to be grateful.

I have done so. I am doing so.

I didn’t create an official list of resolutions or goals for 2022. I carried them in my heart and lived them, as I will for this new year on the cusp.

But I did write a few things… this is my 365th post of the year. Something I’ve never accomplished before.

Day by day, moment by moment, the story of life unfolds. Goals are attained the same way.

My wish for you: Believe. Let awe weave itself around you and through you.

And write.

See how you grow.

The unused goal page in my my planner…a bit of seed, if needed