You bring the fog
In the fall a soft fog
And I follow a call
Saying, “Come” ✏️ 🎤 🎵
Mother Nature’s little sister
Taught me everything I know ✏️ 🎤 🎵
It’s fine, Babe
It’s fine.
I do it all the time, Babe.
Except I never know what to tell you when I’m done. ✏️ 🎤 🎵
Hypothesis: A big reason we love books, movies, and recorded music is that they offer to our lower brains a passable simulacrum of company. Inspiring, beautiful, mind-expanding they can be. But they are, at their root, an inferior substitute for basic emotional and relational goods that come from real, live, human company…
…writes the man whose wife of twenty years hasn’t been home in a week and is currently incommunicado on a sailboat in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
🎨 I’m dithering writing to myself about Paul McCartney while wife is making this:
Carla: There’s a book I wanna read.
Éa: Me, too. But I finished it.
If something matters to Carla, then it matters to me.
Éa: You’re very good at putting buns in. But you’re not very good at sleeping in them.
Carla: Build me up and tear me down! Build me up and tear me down!
Éa: At least you’re even!
Scott: You can’t touch my face. I’m in quarantine.
Carla: Well, I can punch your face!
Carla: [Saint] Paul totally bonked. He was a-bonkin!
Scott: Paul wasn’t bonking.
Carla: C’mon. You know he was bonking!
Scott: You are the strangest Christian wife I could have acquired.
My new motto in life is: If it’s not worth doing for free, it’s not worth doing!
— Carla, to Frank
Éa: What’s a placenta?
Sullivan: What!? You don’t know what a placenta is? Mom, we have failed.
Carla: Why can’t I be a ten-year-old boy? I’ve always wanted to dress like a ten-year-old boy!
Scott: You often do.
[overheard while Sullivan and Éa build a precarious fort]:
Éa: Sully, did you just swear!?
Sullivan: What!? No!
Éa: No really, Sully, did you say the S word?
Sullivan: No! Only Mom does that!
And then I wrapped my ankle brace around my uterus.
— Carla
Scott: Sometimes I wish I were the smaller one.
Carla: Why, so you could beat me up?
Oh my gosh. Jesus.
— Carla
No, no, no, your ridicule is quite powerful. I appreciate it, actually.
— Scott, to Carla
Scott: Oh, Carla, you don’t get cranky.
Carla: No, but I do get honest.
**Donna: ** Sullivan’s mom would volunteer [in the library] for a Tuesday, but would need to bring Sullivan’s sister. Is that okay?
Mardi: Yep! If she’s anything like Sullivan, she could probably help out too!
Donna: We are a go!
Scott [after Carla suffers a seemingly neverending sneeze attack]: What is your body trying to get rid of?
Carla [sniffling]: My face.
I enjoy watching my family do things I suspect other families do not but which I consider healthy. In this photo, all three of them are leaning out or about to lean out past the boardwalk rail in searching of jewelweed pods ready to pop.
It turns out the seeds are edible!
I took an impromptu break from work late morning today to cuddle with Carla and tell her about the occasional pit in my stomach I’ve been feeling when ruminating on my doubts and when approaching the kids, or really about being wrong about anything. It was reassuring just to talk with her about it, to relate my fears and doubts to someone, and to hear in myself a commitment to endure in Christ-ward faith.
Romance has been this sort of…odd side project for us.
— Scott, in a large campfire discussion at his tenth wedding anniversary party of how friendship is the basis of his and Carla’s relationship
I bought Carla some flowers today. Consider it an improvement on the one cut rose per year we’ve been married.