Category: Vermont Life

Craft Update: Owls and Mermaids and Chickens (Oh My!)

At first, my husband didn’t read this blog — at least, not regularly. He was more like a “check in every few months” type of reader. But when I gently told him that he might be missing major insights into my inner life, that some 300 readers might possibly know me better than my own husband, and that I might just post embarrassing stories about him, he subscribed to the blog feed.

Now that he’s a regular reader, Erick is my most honest critic. So, he tells me that things have been getting a little…heavy…on this blog lately. I know, I know: What’s WITH all this life and death and introspection?!? Where are the cute photos of our girls, the puppy updates (coming), the humorous anecdotes about our pest-control problems?

All I can say is: those cycles of life and death that I’ve been writing about apply to blog topics, too. And what with autumn’s darker and colder weather, the butterfly that never hatched, and the backyard chicken massacre, lately I’ve been kind of on the death side of the cycle.

But that’s about to change; the upswing is starting with this very post. Because, my friends, today I am writing to gloat — er, SHARE — about my latest craft projects!

Those who’ve been reading for a while will recall that, when we moved to Vermont, my mother gave me her old sewing machine. Last winter, I decided to start becoming a craftier person by sewing some dresses for the girls.

Well, my craftiness took a vacation for the summer. But now that it’s fall-becoming-winter, I’M BACK! It gets dark at about 5 PM now, and I’ve got to find something else to do around here at night. We seldom go out after dark, since that involves babysitters (i.e. MONEY) and driving down empty country roads with the brights on. We don’t have a TV, and there’s only so much reading and writing and cleaning a person can do. Bring on the crafts!

Here’s the thing I’m most proud of: I didn’t use a pattern for any of the crafts below. They’re all things that I dreamed up in my head and then made real. Which is a lot of fun, and probably takes me to the next level of craftiness, don’t you think?

CRAFT #1: The Owl Pillow

We have a beige couch and beige chair in our living room, and I was feeling the need to inject a little color and fun into the place. So, I decided to sew an owl pillow. Why an owl pillow? you ask. Well, we have a whole bunch of barred owls who live in the woods around our house. All night long we can hear them calling Who-who-who-whooooo! I love these owls; they look stately and wise, and whenever I hear them I think, You go, owls! Eat those mice!!!

So, here’s what I did with some burlap, fleece, felt, and embroidery floss from Ben Franklin’s:

CRAFT #2: The Mermaid Fins

One of Fiona and Campbell’s best friends decided to have a Pirate Party when she turned five. There was no way I was getting my girly-girls to dress up in pirate garb, but MERMAIDS are another story. I designed these fins to work like wrap skirts. They look great, are super-comfortable, and the girls have been wearing them for dress-up long after the party. I may have to make one for myself.

CRAFT #3: The Chicken Stuffie

Okay, so first of all, my girls call stuffed animals “stuffies.” I have no idea why; it’s certainly nothing Erick or I ever said.

ANYWAY, when their 2-year-old cousin Aiden came to visit us in Vermont last summer, we weren’t sure if he’d like it here. Aiden lives in Orange County, CA, which is pretty much the epitome of planned suburbia. He lives near Disneyland. How would he handle our crazy Vermont-woods girls?

He did great, and it turns out — huge surprise to all of us — that Aiden is NUTS about chickens. When we took him to Shelburne Farms, that kid was chasing after hens bigger than himself and catching them with his bare hands. He couldn’t get enough of our chicks (R.I.P.), who were then still fluffy and cute in the brooder box in our garage.

So, when I started thinking about a Christmas present for Aiden, which I do early because (a) I have only one nephew, and (b) I’m clueless and terrified at the prospect of gifts for BOYS, the obvious choice was: make him a chicken stuffie! That way, he could have his favorite part of Vermont in Orange County — only it would be much more hygienic (and hopefully have a happier outcome) than the real thing.

I’m sharing this here because I’m pretty sure that Aiden doesn’t read this blog, and I’m trusting his parents to keep it on the down-low:

Of course, the predictable outcome, which I somehow failed to anticipate, was that once I showed it to the girls, Campbell said, “I don’t have a chicken stuffie.” So I suspect there may be a few more of these in my future.

There you have it: a little peek at what I’ve been up to in the evenings. See? It’s not all deep thinking around here!

That Crazy Tree

I’ve been reading The Artist’s Way this past month. This is the sort of book, marketed as “A Course in Discovering and Recovering Your Creative Self,” that I’d usually avoid. Really, who has the time? Its author, Julia Cameron, claims to have helped countless “blocked artists” discover “a spiritual path to higher creativity.” I bought this book back when I was a legitimate artist, having just completed a photography degree in New York City — but apparently it didn’t work for me back then, because I made it to the third chapter and then quit photography.

I’m not sure why I decided to pick up this book again, since I wouldn’t describe myself as an “artist” — unless by “artist” you mean “someone who started writing a blog about her kids and then got tired of writing about her kids.” Nor would I describe myself as “blocked,” although I’m sure there are some who WISH I’d develop a little writer’s block.

I guess I just hate to have a book in my house that’s partially read. And it’s turned out to be pretty good. My FAVORITE part is when Cameron recommends taking yourself out on a weekly “artist date,” where you go off alone to do something fun and restorative. That seems like a good idea for anybody, artist or no. So, the “artist date” was on my mind when Erick took out all three girls on a recent Saturday morning. I figured I’d give it a try; beats cleaning the house.

I decided to take a hike. I love walking, and looking, and thinking. When the girls are around, I may be able to walk short distances, but I have to watch THEM instead of the scenery, and there’s always too much chatter for me to hear myself think. A nice, quiet hike seemed just the thing for my first artist date.

The problem is, hiking by myself makes me a little nervous; I’m still too much of a city girl. I worry about things like getting killed. And where we live, the options for hiking tend towards two opposing but potentially dangerous scenarios: rugged wilderness trails, or the narrow shoulders of winding roads along which cars drive waaaay too quickly.

But there is one exception: the TAM. TAM stands for “Trail Around Middlebury,” and is a 16-mile loop around Middlebury through conserved land owned by the Middlebury Area Land Trust. I opted to walk a small section of the trail that starts at the Middlebury College golf course and ends close to town. The assurance that retirees with golf clubs would be within shouting distance was enough to make me feel passably secure.

It was a beautiful, sunny late summer day. The section of trail that I walked is mostly wooded, with a few open fields between the trees. It felt secluded and quiet — I passed no more than five other people along the way. Then, in one dappled green stretch of woods, I looked up and spotted this tree:

I know the photo isn’t great — I snapped it with my iPod — but LOOK at that crazy tree! I can’t see the leaves well enough to tell what kind of tree it is, but I think it’s an oak. Oak trees — the ones in my yard, at least — usually grow up straight and strong and tall. Certainly all the trees around this one were growing straight, or else I wouldn’t have noticed it. Something happened to this tree, something was strange enough about its environment that its trunk veered off in one direction, and then abruptly changed course and doubled back upon itself. From the looks of it, this may have happened several times.

And yet, the tree survived. It’s healthy, thriving there in the woods. And isn’t it beautiful? Much more interesting than all the straight arrow trees around it.

There are a couple of points in life — usually around age 18 and 21 — when people make Big Decisions. Decisions about school, work, life partners. We tend to invest these decisions with a sense of great importance; we worry that we’ll make the wrong choice, and then we worry that we did make the wrong choice. By “we,” of course, I mean “me.” I went to college with no idea where to focus my attention, then bopped along through a series of decisions: graduate degree in education, teaching job, graduate degree in studio art, photography freelancer, nonprofit manager, mother. I love what I’m doing right now the best, but whatever you call this life I’ve cobbled together, you can’t call it “employment.” And that’s what tends to matter on paper and at cocktail parties.

When I saw that crazy tree, though, it reminded me of my life — and not just my life, but the lives of so many people I know and love.

So, I decided that when my girls reach the age of Big Decision Making, I’m going to show them the picture of this crazy tree — or take them to see it in person. And I’ll say something like this:

You’re worried about making the wrong choices, and your choices DO matter, but you don’t need to worry so much. Check out this crazy tree. This tree didn’t worry, it just grew towards where the most light was at each stage of its life. It’s okay if you change your mind later, or if you look back and feel like you were all over the place. As long as you’re growing towards the light at each stage of your life, you’ll be okay. And when you stand back to look, it’ll be beautiful.

College Town

‘Does it hurt?’ asked the Rabbit.

‘Sometimes,’ said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. ‘When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.’

-from The Velveteen Rabbit

What happens when you end up living in a college town that’s almost a carbon copy of the town where you spent your own undergraduate years?

I went to Williams College, a small liberal arts school of about 2,000 students in Massachusetts’ Berkshire Mountains. I now live near where my husband teaches: Middlebury College, a small liberals arts school of about 2,000 students in Vermont’s Green Mountains. When he was interviewing for his job, Erick knew that I had some concerns about the deja vu aspect of this move, so he specifically asked his future colleagues how Middlebury differed from Williams. “Oh,” they scoffed, “Williams is out in the middle of nowhere. It’s tiny. Middlebury is much more of a town.”

I found — and still find — this comparison hilarious. It’s like arguing the relative difference between a flea and a gnat. In fact, as of the 2000 census Middlebury’s population was 8,183; Williamstown’s was 8,424. (And please note that those numbers include the  2,000 undergrads who descend on each town for nine months of the year). Both towns are centered around a single main street. It may be true that Middlebury’s main street is slightly longer, with slightly more offerings that Williamstown’s. But I’m living in essentially the same town where I went to college.

So far, it’s been interesting how little I’m aware of living in a college town. Sure, my husband goes off to work at the college every morning. Sure, I’ll occasionally notice students walking around downtown. Roads and restaurants are busier during special weekends when the students’ families come to town. Many of our friends work for the college in some capacity — but by no means all of them. There’s an unofficial “college pew” at our church where all the students sit together. Our daughters take swim lessons taught by members of the college swim team at the college pool. We’ve even had students from Erick’s senior seminar over to our house.

That sounds like a lot of interaction with the college, but it’s such a vastly different experience from when I actually attended college that I seldom feel any deja vu. As a mother of three, more than a decade out of college myself, I’m in a different world. We’re a 15-minute drive away from campus, and — what with the three young kids — we don’t attend many campus events. Shockingly, the undergraduate population tends not to breakfast at 7 AM, hang out in the children’s room of the public library, frequent the local playgrounds, or eat dinner at 5:30 PM. So we don’t see much of them.

When I do see groups of undergrads going about their college lives, they seem very young, and very loud. Their confidence and energy make me a little nervous. They appear to float on their own potential; most of them haven’t yet felt life’s hard blows that cultivate humility and empathy.

I look and them and think, NOT FOR ANYTHING WOULD I WANT TO BE BACK WHERE YOU ARE.

College was not a particularly happy time for me. As I understand it, many people look back on college as the best years of their lives: years when they forged lasting friendships, joyfully experimented in both the academic and personal arenas, and emerged after four years having found themselves.

For me, college was when I lost myself.

This may come as a shock to some people who knew me during college — perhaps even to most people who knew me then. I put up a very good front, as I’ve done for most of my life, because that’s what good girls do.

When I arrived at Williams, many of my peers seemed to already know who they were and where they were headed. They’d survived the proving ground of high school, and now they were ready to soar off on their talent. Sure, some edges needed to be smoothed, but at a basic level they were who they would be. Maybe it only seemed that way, but over a decade later these college friends and acquaintances still appear to be fundamentally who they were back then.

I was not that undergrad. I came to college looking like I had it all together, having spent the first 18 years of my life being perfect: working hard, getting good grades, going to church, and trying to make everybody happy. High school wasn’t much of a proving ground for me; I more or less breezed through it with a group of like-minded peers.

Problem is, trying to be perfect and make everybody happy for 18 years doesn’t leave much room for becoming a real person. I was 18 years old and I didn’t have a single opinion of my own. Going to church didn’t help me with identity formation, frankly, because if you’re perfect then you completely miss the point of grace. How can you receive forgiveness and love despite your failings if you’ve never actually failed?

No, when I arrived at college, I was more like the description of a crab cake I once saw on a menu: “Just enough binding to hold it together.”

If this were a novel or a movie, what would happen to a protagonist like that? Clearly, they’d have to fail. Something would have to rip apart the binding of their fragile self so that the pieces could be put back together more securely. It’s an old story. It’s The Velveteen Rabbit: the toy bunny needs to be discarded on the trash heap with a broken heart in order to become Real.

And, thankfully, that did happen to me: I made mistakes. The specifics aren’t important. These weren’t major crimes against humanity; they were the kind of mistakes that happen when you wander through four years of college without knowing who you are. But they were major to me, because I wasn’t supposed to make mistakes. And it wasn’t pretty; the ripping apart of my binding that began in college resulted in a three-year post-college morass of depression and anorexia, during which time I distanced myself from friends and family. It wasn’t until I found grace and Erick — almost simultaneously — that my pieces started to come together again.

I missed my college reunion this year (because our California family was visiting) and I’m very sorry that I did. None of this was college’s fault; I still have fun memories, and I made some friends whom I hope to know forever (and whom I wish I saw more often!). I wanted to be at that reunion, because I think that most people who knew me in college didn’t really know me. I’d like to have a chance to get re-introduced.

So, these are the thoughts that enter my mind when I come into contact with undergrads these days. I’m glad for those moments, for living in a town that allows me periodic flashbacks to the lost-est time of my life. I wonder how many of these students — underneath their pulled-together, confident exteriors — are just as much of a mess as I was back then. (For that matter, I wonder how many of my own college peers were just as much of a mess as I was back then? Probably a fair amount).

NOT FOR ANYTHING WOULD I WANT TO BE BACK WHERE YOU ARE, I’d like to tell these undergrads, BUT NOT FOR ANYTHING WOULD I HAVE SKIPPED IT.

Here’s what I would have skipped: My panic and shame at having my perfect front deconstructed. It was that panic and shame that I took out on my body, my family, my friends. And for that, I’ll always be deeply sorry.

So if I were to give advice to any undergrad who, like me, arrives at college as a hollow shell of “perfection,” it would be this: DO NOT PANIC when you discover that you’re not perfect after all. Welcome it as the thing that will make you who you are, as radiation therapy for your soul. But don’t wallow. Show yourself some grace. Gently pick up your pieces and start looking for the tools to put yourself back together again.

In a recent segment on the NPR program This American Life called “The Ghost of Bobby Dunbar,” a woman from a family that had suffered tragedy, deceit, and mistaken identity concluded, “If you hate that it happened, then you hate that you are.”

If you hate that it happened, then you hate that YOU ARE.

You should never, EVER, hate that you are.

Requiescat in Pace, Pulli*

*Latin for “Rest in Peace, Chickens.” Yep, I took a little Latin in college.

I’m gonna keep this brief, because if you know me well or keep up with me on Facebook, it’s old news. But I figure it’s a narrative thread that I need to tie up, so here goes:

We no longer have any chickens.

You may recall that, a couple of weeks ago, Brinkley killed one of our chickens, bringing the total down to three. Earlier this week, two neighborhood dogs finished the job.

It was a grey Monday morning, and it’d been raining for three days. As usual, I’d fed the chickens and let them out of their coop at around 6:30 AM, but what with the rain and the recent Brinkley attack, they were inclined to stay up in their roosting area.

At around 9 AM, as I came downstairs from wrestling the girls into a relative state of cleanliness and dressed-ness, I looked out the kitchen window and froze: there were two chocolate labs, dogs that I’d seen running through our yard from time to time, INSIDE the chicken fence with mouths full of feathers. Chicken corpses littered the ground at their feet. I knew right then that they were all dead.

I pulled on my boots and raced out the door to yell at the dogs and get them out of the coop. The girls followed me outside. “HEY! Get outta there!” I shouted. The dogs looked at me calmly and ambled away. I suggested that the girls stay inside, because the scene looked pretty gory, but they insisted on coming with me.

It was a mess. The dogs had bashed their way through the wire fence, and then ripped a wall out of the chicken coop in order to pull the chickens down from their roost. Body parts and pieces of wood were everywhere. I checked around to see if there were any survivors, because it was hard to count the total kill based on the partial bodies strewn around. No survivors.

“Gross,” Fiona said. “That’s even grosser than the dead chipmunk.” (A small specimen of roadkill that represented her grossest dead animal — until now).

I don’t know what made me think it, but I decided to call our next-door neighbor, Brinkley’s owner. I figured she’d know who owned the dogs, and she might also appreciate knowing that she wouldn’t have to worry about Brinkley killing our chickens anymore. This was one of the best calls I’ve ever made. Not only did she know the dogs’ owner (turns out these dogs have a reputation for breaking out of their electric fence and roaming the neighborhood, and were even on the Forest Service’s “warning” list for chasing deer), but she offered to call the owner for me.

Then she asked, “Have you cleaned it up yet?” I told her I hadn’t.

“I’m coming over right now to take care of it for you. You shouldn’t have to clean that up with little ones in the house,” she said. And no matter how much I protested, she insisted.

A few hours later, the dogs’ owner called and was as sweet and apologetic as could be. But, what can you do?

Aside from the four dead chickens, the worst thing about this is the sense of waste. It took a LOT of time, effort, and expense to raise these chickens over the past five months. They would’ve started laying eggs next month, and we never even saw that pay-off.

But the way I see it, the good things outweigh the bad. Here they are:

1. I learned that I have the absolute best neighbor in the world. I would give our next-door neighbors my kidney, my right arm, even one of our girls (hmmm….) for the asking. At the very least, I hope I have a chance to clean up some dead animals for them in the future.

2. I got to have some good conversations with our girls about death and nature throughout the day — about dogs being dogs, chickens being chickens, and death being part of life.

3. I have one less thing to take care of. It’s funny that I’d just written about adding things to my life, and my mom’s concern that I was taking on too much. Apparently the universe agreed with my mom. (Don’t you hate it when that happens?) The way I see it, these chickens were taken out of our lives at the perfect time, making way for the new puppy that’s set to arrive later next week. And I can’t say that I’m sorry not to have to feed the chickens on those cold, dark winter mornings when I’ll already be taking the dog out to relieve herself.

We learned a lot. We had fun with those chickens. We’re not the only people we know who’ve lost an entire flock to predators. And if we get more chickens next spring, we’re also getting an electric chicken fence.

Adding It Up

And then there were three: two smart ones and a lucky one. (The doughnuts were a little post-trauma treat, not a regular occurrence!)

Brinkley killed one of our chickens last week.

Here’s how it happened: For those of you who don’t know, Brinkley is our neighbor’s Golden Retriever, but we’ve “adopted” him to the point that our neighbors looped their electric dog fence around our yard. So Brinkley has the run of our yard, and we love him. Since July, when we first put the chickens outside, Brinkley has shown admirable restraint — he’s been interested in them, but until lately he never made any aggressive moves.

We keep the chicken coop inside a fenced yard. Here’s the weakness: because our yard is so rocky, we can’t sink the fence deeply into the earth to keep predators from digging under it. The fence is chicken wire strung between metal posts, but the chicken wire sits level with the ground. So last week, when Brinkley started digging under the fence and pushing up the wire with his 80 pounds of doggy energy, he won. I’d caught him inside the chicken yard several times, but luckily no harm was done.

Then, last Friday, as I pulled into the driveway with Georgia (the other two girls were in preschool), expecting a quiet, uneventful afternoon, our neighbor from across the street came up the driveway. She was watching Brinkley while his owners were away, and had caught him with one of our white Leghorns in his mouth. She saved the chicken — who was a little slobbery and wobbly and traumatized, but otherwise unhurt — and returned her to the chicken coop. I went to check on the chickens — and found only the lucky Leghorn and one of our Rhode Island Reds inside. That left TWO chickens unaccounted for.

My quiet afternoon turned into a frantic chicken hunt. It’s unclear exactly what happened, but it appears that three of the chickens may have escaped their yard by squeezing under part of the fence that Brinkley had warped with his digging. Once they became totally free-range chickens, they were also fair game for Brinkley. Amazingly, the OTHER Rhode Island Red eventually fluttered down from a tree branch above the chicken yard, where she’d taken shelter during the chicken massacre. As for the other Leghorn, all I found of her was a pile of feathers and a dismembered leg.

I wasn’t totally devastated; it’s pretty rare for a chicken to die of old age. Although I’d have liked to have gotten a few eggs out of this hen before she became Brinkley’s chew toy, chickens don’t usually inspire deep affection. They’re not cuddly creatures; even as chicks, our chickens hated to be held, and now it’s almost impossible to catch them. They’re nervous, flighty creatures whose main interest is food.

But I felt worse than I expected. Those chickens were my responsibility. I was prepared for them to die at some point, but it was still my job to keep them alive as long as possible. If you were looking for someone to pin the blame on in this situation, all evidence pointed straight to: ME. It was hard to be mad at Brinkley; he was just a dog being a dog. And the chickens were just being chickens. But I was the one who’d wanted the chickens to begin with, and I was the one who’d invited our neighbors to include our yard in Brinkley’s fenced run. I’d brought a hunting dog and chickens together, and when the inevitable happened, I had only myself to blame.

“You just keep adding and adding and adding,” my mother said to me during her latest visit. She was concerned after we told her that we were thinking of getting a dog of our own. And she’s right: three children in four years, four chickens, our neighbor’s dog, and now possibly our own dog. I DO have a little problem with adding things to my life. But here’s why: I think it’s almost never bad to add something else to love. Don’t most of us add and add? We form new relationships, get married, have children, acquire pets. Isn’t love the motivation behind all of those things?

I have a hard time saying that I love our chickens. I got them because we go through at least a dozen eggs a week, and because I thought it would be nice for the girls to have some animals around to watch and care for. But I raised them from chicks, I feed them and clean their coop, and I guess that’s a form of love.

Here’s the scaly underbelly of love, though, the thing we try to fool ourselves into forgetting: nothing lives forever. My husband, my children, my chickens, Brinkley, myself — we’re all going to die. When we add things to our lives, we’re adding present-tense love, with the promise of future-tense pain and loss.

So why keep adding at all?

I thought about that while I checked on my lonely Leghorn all that afternoon — a chicken who’d just suffered shock and loss herself, and appeared about as depressed as it’s possible for a chicken to be. I thought about that when Brinkley came running up to me proudly, carrying a mouthful of white feathers. I thought about that when I told my two oldest girls that Brinkley had killed one of their chickens.

Guess what the girls wanted to do after I picked them up from preschool? I am absolutely not making this up: they wanted to go play hide & seek in the cemetery. So we did.

And then I thought: we can live with loss. We can feel the pain and learn from it and work through it and heal. But I cannot, I cannot, live without love. So I will keep adding.

Also, I will reinforce that chicken fence.

Mystery

Because it was highly recommended to me by several respected friends, I’ve finally gotten around to reading Wendell Berry’s novel Jayber Crow. I tend to be suspicious of things that come highly recommended, but this turned out to be a phenomenal book: a beautiful portrait of a man, a community, agriculture, religion, and life in general.

I’m glad I didn’t read it until I moved to Vermont. Berry set Jayber Crow in Port William, a small town in Kentucky during the mid-20th-century, but in many ways he could be describing my own small town in Vermont today. For instance, there’s this sentence about halfway through the book that I probably wouldn’t have noticed until this past year:

“Like, I think, most of the people in Port William, Roy lived too hard up against mystery to be without religion.”

Roy is a very minor character, and this sentence is tossed off in a tangential plotline, but it nearly smacked me with its truth.

The story leaves vague exactly what Wendell Berry meant when he wrote that “Roy lived too hard up against mystery.” He might be talking about agriculture; the character of Roy in Jayber Crow is a farmer. It’s hard to escape mystery when you live in a town where agriculture and nature are still closely intertwined with daily life. I’m not sure how you can watch a chick hatch, or a field of corn push up through the earth, and not feel it in your heart. To be a farmer, it seems, you’ve got to have faith in something — if only that the eggs will hatch and the seeds sown will push up. And to be a farmer, you have to come to some understanding with death; it’s a fact that everything you sow and grow will die eventually, either by your own hand or someone else’s. I’m not a farmer, but I do raise chickens and plants, I live in close proximity to farms and have friends who are farmers — and I’ve been changed by a year of watching these mysterious cycles of life and death unfold.

But I think agriculture is only part of it: every person has these same mysterious cycles of life and death, joy and grief, weaving in and out of their lives. This is true no matter where you live, but living in a small town makes it easier to see. When there are fewer people to know, you get to know them better. You learn their stories.

Last month, NPR aired an interview with the band The Avett Brothers, during which Seth Avett said, “The older you get…in some ways you’re just biding your time between tragedies.” The mystery that comes with small town life is that you KNOW about the tragedies, and you also get to SEE, close up, people biding their time between the tragedies — and not just biding their time, but LIVING, carrying on. How most people are able to continue with life is a great mystery. Some days, I feel like I’m surrounded by unsung heroes.

Here’s an example:

At our church, we sometimes sing a song called “Glory be to God.” (You can listen to a version of it here). It was a new song for me when we moved to Vermont, and it’s just pure praise. The other Sunday, we sang “Glory be to God” again. Standing where I was, I could see in my peripheral vision people who had recently suffered unimaginable loss, people who were struggling with mental illness, people who had escaped dangerous situations, single parents trying to raise their children through heartache, people who had no idea what their next step in life would be. And ALL THESE PEOPLE stood there, singing “Glory be to God…Forever and ever!”

Talk about mystery; it was almost too much for me — my heart felt like it was in a tug of war between joy and sorrow. What I saw that Sunday was my vision of heaven: not perfect cherubim flitting around playing their harps, but broken, hurting, totally IMperfect people standing up together and singing “Glory be to God.”

Now, here’s the thing: this doesn’t just happen in small towns. It happens everywhere. It was happening in my previous churches, but I didn’t notice it as much because those churches were large, so I didn’t really know people’s stories. Also, the people who went to these churches were mostly young, which meant that they looked like they had it all together, or they hadn’t yet lived enough to accumulate an impressive series of tragedies.

This doesn’t just happen in places of worship, either; you don’t have to go to church (or mosque, or synagogue) to experience this kind of mystery. The  people around us are singing with their lives every day. Maybe, in larger towns, it’s easier to hide your tragedies, keep your story private, and give the appearance of everything being okay. But everything is never okay. Like I said, it’s just that small towns make this easier to see.

I wish that everybody could experience what I did in church that day, that little vision of heaven.  It took living in a small town for me to see the mysterious pain, love, grace, strength, and redemption everywhere, in nature and in people. But we all live “hard up against mystery,” it just might require more attention — eyes and ears and hearts a little more open — to notice it in the suburbs.

According to Wendell Berry, once you’ve lived “hard up against mystery,” it’s hard to avoid religion. Do with that word what you will; I mean it as “faith in something outside yourself.” Whatever it is that keeps chicks hatching, corn sprouting, and people surviving, it’s certainly not me. It’s a mystery — and most of us, I think, are detectives, spending our lives gathering clues, trying to get closer to figuring out whodunnit.