While at my parents’ house, I’m a kid again—sleeping as late as possible and hoping my dad makes pancakes. South Carolina’s Glassy Mountain, where Mom and Dad live, is probably at its best in the early morning—although I wouldn’t know much about that (because of the sleeping). But I got a taste when two wet noses poked me out of bed and out of doors before anyone had even brewed a cup of coffee.

I tuck my pajama pants into boots, pull on a jacket, and escape the early morning preparations— the stuffing of a bird and the mixing of pumpkin goo for pie. The house has smelled like sautéed onions since before dawn, but outside I breathe crisp air and watch the sun creeping orange over mountains. What’s that I see shining like glass so far away, low-lying wisps of clouds or mist-covered bodies of water?

I decide on water, not clouds, and leave the road, following a path into the woods. The hounds are in their sniffing glory, and I’m all tangled in leashes. I find a big rock and sit.

The view from up here is—well, there are no words, so I don’t try but instead imagine Son saying to Father, Look—over here—at what I’ve made. Did Christ know light and shadow on mountains would sing of His very Self? That on a chilly Thanksgiving morning a girl with two dogs would slip out before the day got too crazy-full with faces and kitchen duty and kid duty, and that she’d wonder at the Person who breathed all this into being? Of course He did.

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Hosea is a funny (peculiar) book. It could be subtitled Since You Put it That Way. Our tendency to wander, to elevate our idols, to trade the grand prize for trinkets is compared to harlotry. Ouch. Hosea himself has an adulterous wife, whom he forgives again and again, counter to his culture. My little Bible study group has been bouncing e-mails back and forth all week about Hosea.

My friend Laura S., divorced and doing the single mom thing with incredible grace, realizes healing doesn’t come through hiding. (With her kind permission,) Laura’s thoughts about Hosea were begging to be shared…

I start with the verse that most made me think of Laura B., for no other reason than its poetic value: “They are all adulterers, burning like an oven whose fire the baker need not stir from the kneading of the dough till it rises.” (Hosea 7:4) It seems like something I would read on her blog.

(note from Laura B.: I’m glad it was only the ‘poetic value,’ not the content, of this verse that brought yours truly to mind.)

There are many other verses that prompt me to take note as well. 

 ”When they go, I will throw my net over them; I will pull them down like birds of the air.”  (Hosea 7:12) We simply cannot escape His sovereignty. Who dare try, but someone who knows not His Word?

 ”Israel is swallowed up; now she is among the nations like a worthless thing.” (Hosea 7:8) This verse makes me think of gossip, and how it leads to improper assessment, invalid judgments and a false permission to exclude and belittle, alienate and isolate—how it swallows up reality and renders worthless the soundness of the perpetrator(s). 

“For I will be like a lion to Ephraim, like a great lion to Judah.  I will tear them to pieces and go away; I will carry them off, with no one to rescue them. Then I will go back to my place until they admit their guilt. And they will seek my face; in their misery they will earnestly seek me.”  (Hosea 5:14-15)  When I read this verse, I think of the Lord pulling His people back to Him from their harlotry, sometimes through catastrophic circumstances. And when I hear of such disasters, I think of the Lord’s judgment—and love.

 This book, Hosea, also mirrors my life over the past several years, particularly, the last few months. It is so personal to me.

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 This morning offered a welcome pause in the middle of days bursting with too much To Do. After a breakfast with friends old and new, I was ruined for bills and phone calls and my inbox for the rest of the afternoon. Instead, I’ve been reading and writing and listening to acorns falling crack! on the roof. When he’s not barking at the falling nuts, the dog keeps tilting his head at me, wondering why I’m sitting still.

The Ladies of our Literary Society (we aspire to say “literary society,” but we always end up saying “book club”) play pretend like little girls not grown-up. Depending on what we’ve been reading, we’re characters in Alice’s Wonderland or dressed in the style of P.J. Woodhouse’s 20s. Sometimes we simply spin a web of other-ness through our talk.

One third Thursday of the month, the six of us sat at luncheon and discussed one of our favorite subjects: days gone by. A spell was cast while we talked of our grandmothers’ first dates or proposals, how dress sizes have shrunk to make modern folk feel less fat and what teenagers must have done for fun a hundred years ago.

As enchanting as that was, there was something missing: old people, in the flesh.

Now, I don’t like to call any lady old, so I won’t. But a couple real live representatives of yesteryear, of the generation who fought for and saved civilization, sat at my dining room table this morning and wove a spell of their own.

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 “Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, ‘What! You too? I thought I was the only one.’” ~ C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

Taking the end of the lunch hour to sneak into the Church of the Redeemer’s stately but cozy living room, where one guy was surfing the internet and another snoring, I found a few minutes to reflect on Hutchmoot as it was unfolding. What’s a Hutchmoot, you say? That, friends, is tough to explain. Let’s just say it’s no ordinary conference. If it were, why would The Spouse and I consider it a getaway?

Saturday, 24 September—The grands are holding down the Boggs fort, which, I’ll admit, seemed to be under siege when Luke and I slunk out the door Wednesday night with our last bit of luggage.

Thanks, Mom and Dad, I typed at the end of three pages of instructions, for keeping the kids while we go fill our minds with stuff we’ll never actually use in real life.

But that’s not quite true, unless real life is only the routine of running offspring here and there and dousing the fires of homework tears and perpetually runny noses and too many bills and e-mails and errands.

Sometimes it feels like that’s all there is.

We’re here with a hundred or so others who’ve stepped away from busy-ness and are trying, I think, to inch toward exchanging what is good for God’s big, scary best.

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My friend Missy Deluca is, among other things, a thinker and wit supreme. This weekend, her inner nerd was drawn to the gathering of 45,000 nerds at DragonCon, a celebration of all things sci-fi.

Oscar Wilde said once, “Life is too important to take seriously.”

I  found myself struggling with this premise Saturday at the annual  Dragoncon parade. The hubs and I dragged all our brood down to Atlanta to oogle sci-fi fans clad in outrageous costumes. We really didn’t know what to expect, but anything nicknamed “Nerdi Gras” had  promise to be a fun morning for the DeLucas.

Before I go on, I have to share a little secret here: a judgmental  street preacher lives inside of me. One who wants to grab a megaphone  and shout, “Repent! The time is near! Think on deeper things! Stop  dressing up as Wonder Woman and get serious with your life!” There’s  definitely a component of truth to this voice inside my head. Indeed,  the days are evil and as followers of the Lord, we must make the most  of every opportunity (Ephesians 5:16). But where does that leave us as  believers? Do we forsake hobbies and novels and just plain silliness? 

Do we stand on the corner of life and look for specks without removing  our planks?

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WARNING: This post contains absolutely no depth and not an ounce of meaning…

I can laugh at Monday’s crazy commute to and from ballet in the light of Tuesday morning. And last night wasn’t anything that couldn’t be mended by take-out food eaten on the sofa in my pajamas after our wild child had gone to bed.

Sadie has been happy lately, and we breathe thanks all the time for her improved mood. But yesterday in the car she got a little too happy. Things started to lean toward chaos when Maggie, 13, screamed like only a 13-year-old can scream that ants were streaming out of Sadie’s car seat, which had been left overnight in the driveway. After pulling over, taking all the fabric off the seat and beating it on the grass, I shoved the plastic monster in the trunk, buckled Sadie into a seatbelt and sped toward the dance studio. That’s when we detected An Odor. And I’d left home without the diaper bag.

No worries—I found a spare Pull-Up and did a quick change in the parking lot while the tardy ballerinas ran into class. “Just tell your teacher there was an ants incident!” I yelled as they ducked inside.

“It’s just you and me, kid,” I said, looking back at Sadie, who had been giggling ever since the ants incident. “You’ve got to stay in your seatbelt.”

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 Sadie, our eight-year-old autistic daughter, has taught me more than anyone about how I can do all things through Him.

Adventure Girl was avoiding the ocean, I was sad to see during the beginning of our Boggs-clan beach trip to St. George. Why was Sadie under the tent with the old ladies (including me) instead of trying to swim to Mexico? We’d tied a rope to her lifejacket, anticipating her usual zest for the water.

But here was a nervous Sadie, a quiet Sadie, like Tigger without his bounce. When, on day four, Sadie dipped in a tentative toe, I seized the chance and plopped down in the shallow waves, motioning for her to sit on my lap. All I had to do was seat my fanny in the wet sand, but it was no small thing, since my policy has always been to STAY OUT, way out , under-the-tent-with-the-old-ladies-out, away from anything that could possibly nibble or brush up against or bite.

When Sadie finally sat, it took my breath away. There was no turning back, and it seemed the only thing to do was start singing—hymn after hymn. Sadie smiled big when she heard His name.

She kept smiling for almost an hour, squishing her feet in the muck and splashing with her fingers and asking for more music. “Want to do again,” she would say, putting her hands on my face if I stopped. We eventually headed in for supper, shriveled like raisins but happy.

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“What’s the deal with airplane peanuts?”~ Jerry Seinfeld

I’ve been alone, more or less, for five days, and I’m starting to talk to myself.

What’s left of my head is swirling with ideas for word-scratching, and I’ve been feeding on good, solid food (Peter Kreeft recordings, a book by G.K. Chesterton, a writing conference, an odd combination of Yo Yo Ma and Andrew Peterson music) and have had miles and miles to think long thoughts. But I don’t have it in me right now to write anything provoking or even decent. But my fingers need to move on the keyboard, and I just need to talk.

I missed a flight today. There was no real reason, really, other than I underestimated the time it would take for MARTA to make its way from Dunwoody to the airport. Hum de dum was my mode while I peered fascinated out the train window at neighborhoods I’d never visited. I was shocked when the ticketing agent said I couldn’t make the plane, not with the big old bag I’d brought to check.

“That has to go with you—for security reasons,” he said, each word carrying condemnation for my vanity. (I’ve never managed to fit my way-too-worldly goods into a carry-on.) Pleading looks and a soft voice got me nowhere. Blast. No, scratch that (I’m in an airport after all). Darn. Why couldn’t my embarrassingly large luggage and I meet up later? I thought today’s terrorists don’t care about getting blown up—why would they smuggle explosives into a suitcase for a flight they weren’t on?

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When I’m grown up and married I’m going to have two horses, a white one and a dappled grey, and three dogs and a garden with only pink flowers and maybe purple, and I’ll have three curly girls named Nora and Faye and Nellie and they’ll wear white, and I will too…

So go the ramblings of my thirteen-year-old daughters, the stuff of their dreams spilling out with the joy of beauty and the lives they hope to lead. Anyone who can remember thirteen knows this: they are dead serious.

I know I was. I was determined to live loveliness and poetry, and hang everyone else. What was this adult pragmatism, this worry over bills and mortgages and disease and all the rest? All that was spoken in Charlie Brown’s teacher-talk.

My girl-dreams were woven with books and old houses and walks in the woods and songs about love and magazine pictures and, I think, TV. There were the Bradys and then the Cosbys and Keatons with houses always tidy—all those kids didn’t even bring in backpacks from school and dump them on the floor. Their hair was forever brushed, and they were snappy dressers with no problems that 22 minutes couldn’t neatly solve.

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I’m out of the swing of things, having been buried in book-writing and now revising since February 1. But I knew I’d come back to the on-line journal. Are you still out there?

This weekend my heart is swollen with gratitude over one of God’s greatest gifts, that of friendship. Little moments have gotten me to thinking, two of them in particular.

First, our friend and neighbor (what a happy combination) popped in Saturday evening, dressed in a tuxedo and almost ready for a fancy party downtown. Bowtie in hand, he needed Luke’s help with tying it, despite a lesson the night before. Bowties are troublesome things. Luke found he had to stand behind our visitor to tie it, not having ever done so from the front. I was in the bedroom getting ready for our own night out—I wondered what all the hilarity from the front hall was about.

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