Feast of the Annunciation 2023

Hello, friends, and happy Feast of the Annunciation to you!

We’ve had some very full months since Christmas and spring is really springing in earnest around here. We slept with a window open for the first time this week (such a welcome change after the cold temperatures in our mostly uninsulated bedroom all winter) and everything is covered in buds, blooms and new green leaves. The plants are being started in the greenhouse (Nathan is doing soil blocks this year!) and the ducks have been moved to our large garden area to eat bugs and break it up. The chickens are roaming everywhere (oops) and the tarps are being moved to new areas of ground we are preparing for planting. It’s only about a month or so until all the seedlings start being hardened off so that they can go into the ground early May. The marathon of summer has begun.

Since writing last, we also went on our Great Family Road Trip of 2023 to and from Texas! Once we figured out the logistics that some of us needed earplugs in the car (ha!), we had a great trip. We explored so much - battlefields, the Atlanta Aquarium, swimming in the Gulf, the Birmingham Civil Rights Museum - but the real winners were all the friends we got to see. Nashville gave us the opportunity to worship with the Richters and days to roam the woods with the Pardos by day (and eat tacos and play Mario Kart and foosball by night!) and Texas gave us the opportunity to hang out with and hug Boston friends we hadn’t seen in person for years. I even got to finally meet and hang out IN REAL LIFE with a friend from Monday night Bible study that I’d never met in person. What a trip! We are already planning the next one. Wesley is campaigning for the Grand Canyon (with a stop in Nashville, of course, for friends!) and I am hoping we can get a camping trailer before we embark again. The only downside was changing hotels every night - I’d much prefer camping.

Once we were home, we hit the ground running on term three of our school year and I’m feeling the tension inherent in life more than ever. Does this happen to you too at seasonal changes? The beauty of this world sometimes overwhelms me and I’m so thankful for the abundance we’ve been given. I was water glassing eggs in this week and praying blessings over the eggs and who will eat them during the dark, cold months of next winter, thinking of how unbelievable it is to me that food can come from relationship with animals, how aesthetically pleasing eggs in jars are, how nutritious the eggs are but also the land enriched by chickens and how thankful I am for chores that force me out of the house into morning sun to synthesize Vitamin D. Our friends bought a cow and I get to milk twice a week and the sheer joy of spending a sunrise with a friend, a sweet animal, the fresh morning air overwhelms. And then the joy of getting to feed my family that milk and making cheese that is a testament to the reality of the unseen worlds that surrounds us all. I realize I might have gone Full Homestead Looney, but, truly, cheese microbes and sourdough yeasts are a testament to me of the reality of angels and saints. We are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, of microbes, of Magic in that truer, deeper sense that modernity rejects.

But all of that Beauty and Magic is held with the reality of evil and brokenness as well. Our beloved cat, Wendell, died a few weeks ago and it was the first major grief of the boys’ lives. We lost a duck to a hawk. A friend in our community has been diagnosed with stage four colon cancer and has been given only a few years left to live with his wife and young children. Friends and family members find themselves in career upheaval and uncertainty. Nothing is permanent.

The longer I live more deeply in nature, the more the joy is always mingled with the sorrow. Spring is joyous, but is only sweet because of the reality of the death inherent in winter. These plants are blooming now to put forth fruit and seeds just to die and return to the earth.

But the cycles also turn toward life and that’s where we are today on the Feast of the Annunciation. The prophecies are coming to fruition; the Light is coming; all things will be made new.