Starting

not a time for best

Poetry helps me with my writing and Katrina Vandenberg’s “Tomatoes” helped me today:

I know those summer tomatoes. Know that the sun - sitting outside and eating them - is the secret ingredient, barefoot on the deck, wood warm from the day, popping them in my mouth. No, I did not wash the tomatoes after I picked them.

That'll be six or even seven months from now. Nobody steps barefoot on the deck these days, unless they have a death wish. Five inches of snow and a layer of ice. 

Not even the dog wants out.

So I bake cookies: chocolate chip with sea salt sprinkled on top. Chocolate cookies with one Andes mint swirled with the back of a spoon so it melts and turns to frosting. Sugar cookies for the Chicago Bears last game, though we didn't know that then.

The latest - iced oatmeal cookies. I used three drops of red food coloring to make the icing pink because why not and I didn't think I'd put enough in but those three drops spread and spread with each turn of the wooden spoon and I had no trouble frosting the entire batch.

The lesson, I guess, is to remember there are seasons. You can't force the tomatoes to grow under January Michigan situations and sometimes pink icing is exactly what an oatmeal cookie needs.

I heard once that January isn't a time for best. Maybe it's not even a time for trying and for sure it's not a time for trying your best. January is a time to begin.
Begin falsely.
Begin finally.
Begin again.

//

After chapel the pastor - who tells us he is a whiskey connoisseur and drives a Jeep Wrangler like a Millennium Falcon, who gave a gorgeous devotion on what it means to repent - 
"turn around," he said
"the kingdom is here," he said
"not on its way - 
here." -
He and I are headed downstairs and he tells me thanks for coming and I say, "You're an author," because he also told us that. 

We all know what my motives are.

"Me too," I'm planning on saying. "My third one just came out."

We would discuss our books and writing. I'd probably ask him what he means when he says he drives his Jeep like the Millennium Falcon. I never ever go out of my way to talk to strangers but when someone calls themselves "writer" or "author" I just assume there will be a connection. I assume the talking will be easy; the conversative wanted.

"Yes," he says but doesn't give me a chance to say, "Me too." 
"I've written quite a few books," he continues, popping a cookie in his mouth. The cookies are for after chapel. You're supposed to eat them and talk. Not take them and leave. Pass the freaking peace, dude.  "One of them is likely going to be a movie," he says, his back to me. 

"Turn around!" I want to yell. "Another author is here! Not on the her way. Here!"
Woe is the person - a woman in a conservative Lutheran institution no less - who compares writing with the Kingdom of Heaven.

He's out the door and I walk down the hallway to my office.

Maybe when the tomatoes are ripe I'll know more about bests and have less to do with beginnings. Maybe soon, starting will cease to be a decision.

I consider the three drops of red that changed everything and Harper texts me to tell me her friend loves the oatmeal iced cookies and I thank her, so happy to share something I made.

“With lyricism and playfulness, Callie Feyen invites readers into her faith stories. She writes of belief and doubt, girlhood and motherhood, marriage and work, bringing to mind my own memories and making me feel seen as a believer. In a book that was surely meant for this moment, Feyen illuminates the terrors that haunt us and the palpable beauty that sustains us — hopeful red geraniums, reading the Bible with a four-year-old, the thunk of soccer balls and the ring of church bells. “Make us scavengers for peace when the waters are too dangerous and too deep for us,” she writes, and also prays. “Keep us wiling to fly. … Let us cling to the belief that we are [all] wonderfully and beautifully made.” - Erin Strybis on, When We Swung From Church Bells