A Touch of Heaven to Hold Onto

On Monday morning the three older children returned to school and I took my three-year-old ice skating at our favorite outdoor rink.

The outdoor rink at Port Jefferson Harbor Park is built next to an old boathouse, which was converted into a community center, a few hundred yards away from the actual harbor. I much prefer the outdoor rink to an indoor one, with its cold, stale air and lack of scenery. While we skate, we can take in the endless view, occasionally disrupted by the departure of the huge, white ferry, which we occasionally board to visit the cousins in Massachussetts.

Last week, during winter break, I had let the children all stay up every night until midnight watching the Olympics. My three-year-old attempted the figure skating moves on the living room rug, often blocking our view of the routines. She wants to be an ice dancer like one of her favorite literary characters, Angelina Ballerina.

She has been skating on the sandbox-turned-ice rink in our backyard on a regular basis, and when I can take them all to the rink she is able to skate independently. So we really enjoy our time together on the ice.

When we arrived, there was one couple with a girl her age; they soon tired of the effort and left. That left us two and an elderly gentleman, who quietly skated around and around the perimeter.

Although she knows she can do it, she always starts off by clinging to me. Then I hold her hands and skate backwards with her, until she decides to let go and skate towards me. Then she starts to mimic my moves. As the ice gets more and more scuffed-up, her confidence increases. During this session, probably the last of the year, she learned to skate backwards as well as in circles. I promised her a cup of hot cocoa if she would smile for a few pictures.

They let us stay on the ice longer, because there were no more customers for the next session. We just kept going and going until we were both utterly exhausted. We put a dollar in the beverage machine for a hot cocoa and another in the snack machine for a bag of Goldfish.

We brought all our stuff out onto a bench at the harbor’s edge and just sat there, sipping our hot cocoa and snacking on Goldfish, and watching the stillness and beauty of the cold, quiet water, glistening on this sunny, forty-degree day. It was truly a touch of heaven to hold onto.

Sirach
Chapter 18
1
The Eternal is the judge of all things without exception; the LORD alone is just.
2
Whom has he made equal to describing his works, and who can probe his mighty deeds?
3
Who can measure his majestic power, or exhaust the tale of his mercies?
4
One cannot lessen, nor increase, nor penetrate the wonders of the LORD.
5
When a man ends he is only beginning, and when he stops he is still bewildered.
6
What is man, of what worth is he? the good, the evil in him, what are these?
7
The sum of a man's days is great if it reaches a hundred years:
8
Like a drop of sea water, like a grain of sand, so are these few years among the days of eternity.
9
That is why the LORD is patient with men and showers upon them his mercy.
10
He sees and understands that their death is grievous, and so he forgives them all the more.
11
Man may be merciful to his fellow man, but the LORD'S mercy reaches all flesh,
12
Reproving, admonishing, teaching, as a shepherd guides his flock;
13
Merciful to those who accept his guidance, who are diligent in his precepts.

Snow: A Lesson in Temporal Beauty

“Where’s my Frosty ?!?” I heard my three-year-old exclaim on Sunday morning, as she went downstairs for breakfast and looked out the back door.

We had had a blizzard the previous weekend, which left behind a record 26.3 inches of snow here on Long Island. The first day it was too dry to make a snowman and the older kids had spent much of the day making trails in the snow for her to walk through. By the third day, there was enough moisture for them to make large snowmen and even a snow bunny. My three-year-old had proudly put the finishing touches on the bunny, adding a purple scarf for it to stay “warm”.

After one week of white beauty, it rained – and rained – and rained – enough for most of all that snow to be washed away. All that was left of the snow creatures were sad little piles of hats and scarves; a carrot; and caps for dishwashing liquid that had served as green “eyes”.

The kids explained to her that Frosty had melted but that it would snow again soon and he would “come back to life someday”.

“IT’S…NOT…FAIR!” she screeched, so that I could hear her from the opposite end of the house upstairs.

When I came back downstairs, I tried again to explain it to her. “The things of this world fade away,” I quoted to the older children, which of course went over her head.

It’s a lesson that children quickly learn; one that can leave them feeling disenchanted, depending on how their parents handle it.

[Here my eleven-year-old hops on my computer and inserts what she thinks my thoughts must be. I leave it because I find it extremely amusing.] I think that it should snow when I want it to snow so I can be happy and have my children not messing the house around so it would be clean and peaceful. Until they come in the house again ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh it is messy again!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Here my twelve-year-old takes a hold of my keyboard and, like her younger sister, comes frighteningly close to the truth of how I feel.] Although the kids mess up the house when they come in from the snow, the peacefulness that I experience when they are out of the house is beyond amazing. Therefore I wish that it would snow anytime I wanted it to. I think that it should be impossible for the snow to come in the house, and then this world would be perfect! Oh yes, and one more addition. That the snow “creations” never melt so that I won’t have to ever hear that snow melting is not fair ever again!!!!!! [Children’s insertions end here.]

Knowing that the world is imperfect, we can find beauty in nature and admire its Creator, knowing that what He has planned for us in everlasting life is way beyond the glimpse He offers us here. We can show our children this, by praising the beauty given us, and letting them know that, although it does not last here on earth, there is a greater beauty beyond our imagination that will go on and on. Snow that does not melt and yet does not make us cold. Leaves that change color and yet do not die and fall to the ground. Greenery that does not make us sneeze and our eyes water.

The stability of the family the child grows up in is yet another glimpse for them into the security of God’s love. As parents we cannot be the perfect Father that God is, but we can give them our unconditional love; the comfort they need as they discover the pain that is inevitable in this world; and the nurturing of their childlike wonder that we should try our best to emulate.

10 ways to get your child outside

Stuck in the indoor rut? Please go to my column to see 10 ways to get your child outside.

Mountain Ranges Revisited

O beautiful for halcyon skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the enameled plain!
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
Till souls wax fair as earth and air
And music-hearted sea!
- from America the Beautiful, Words by Katharine Lee Bates,
Melody by Samuel Ward

I spent most of the last week among various mountain ranges, from Tennessee to Pennsylvania. I love living near the ocean, but traveling through all the various terrain America has to offer really puts me in awe of God's creation. I have written about my surreal experience going through the Shenandoah Valley at sunrise on my way to Tennessee. On the way back I passed through it at sunset for an altogether different experience. Although I was on the wrong side of the car to take a good picture of either sunrise or sunset, I have selected a few of the many beautiful shots I got to offer a sampling of what we saw on our return trip.

Leaving western Tennesse, the Cumberland Plateau:



Cows graze comfortably in between the interstate and the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina, as seen from Tennessee:



Sunset over the Shenondoahs tinted the entire sky of Virginia in wondrous colors:



We even passed directly under a rainbow in that same valley, as seen on the left side of this picture:



The Pennsylvania mountains welcomed us with bright green valleys in the morning:



And, always a great sight welcoming me home to New York, Manhattan as seen from the George Washington Bridge:



I love all of America, but most of all I love New York, and appreciate it all the more after having spent time elsewhere.

Shenandoah Sunrise

Sunrise

I was in “the zone”, a very pleasant place in which the brain is undecided between either sleep or wakefulness. The previous day I had gone swimming in the rolling waves of Cupsogue Beach in Westhampton. Every time I tried to go to sleep, I would picture myself floating on those waves, and I could feel the beta waves switching on. Even though I could not fall into a deep sleep, I would open my eyes feeling more wakeful.

I opened my eyes and the previously black sky had turned dark blue. It was 5:45 AM and my travel companion informed me that we were passing through the Shenandoah Valley. Straight ahead of us the morning star was visible. As I looked around, I could faintly see the darker outline of the mountains all around me.

“Oh wow, this is definitely worth staying awake for,” I said, and watched in awe over the next fifteen minutes as the sun rose over the mountain range. First the sky turned lighter and lighter shades of blue. Then the pink started to tinge the edges of the peaks. Various shades of rose came and went until the entire sky was light blue, and the moment was gone.

I finally felt safe to go to sleep, and got a power nap for a half hour; it was the only sleep I had gotten in the past two days. I woke up with an amazing second wind and took over the driving for the second half of the 900-mile drive from Eastern Long Island to Western Tennessee.

“Are you okay? Do you know where you are?” my friend asked me.

“No, I don’t know where I am, but this does,” I said, gesturing to the GPS, my Valentine’s Day present last year.

“And you’re fine with that?” she asked incredulously.

“Yeah. Absolutely.”

That image would hold me out for the rest of the day. As I felt the monotony of the GPS’ telling me to stay on I-81-S for another several hundred miles; of being in Virginia for several hundred miles; and of driving through endless hills and trees and cows for several hundred miles, I would bring forth that image of the sun breaking the day over the mountain range.

Click here for my article “Top 10 tips for long distance driving with children”.

Click here for my article "10 tips for vacationing in the home of a friend or family member".

Click here for my article "10 things to pack for a day trip"

Click here for my article "Tips for an impromptu hotel stay"

Disconnected

On Friday evenings we go to the library for our summer reading club prizes. This week my three-year-old won a little pink pail and shovel. “Just what we needed to go to the beach!” I told the librarian. My poor kids have been taking empty chlorine buckets to the beach because none of the stores I frequent carry pails and shovels.

She lifted up her pail and shovel and asked, “We go to the beach now?”

“Not now, honey,” I answered, wishing that I had time to take them that weekend. The salty air would help with clearing up my allergic cough.

She carried that pail and shovel around the house and yard with her all weekend, repeatedly asking until bedtime, “We go to the beach now?”

So finally Monday morning comes around with promising weather and nothing on our schedule. We go to Cedar Beach in Mount Sinai, carrying nothing but a jug of water, lunch bag, and towels.

I’d spent the morning answering emails and telephone calls and, with my cell phone turned off, I felt free of electronic communications as soon as I left the house.

My husband has been joking that I am going to be sucked into “The Matrix” because I have been spending so much time on the computer. Now that I have my laptop with wireless internet, I can keep it on all the time and go back and forth between that and household business whenever we are in the house.

I carried it upstairs to my desktop computer one night so I could copy my favorite websites from one to the other. I started to get confused working with two computers at once, typing on one keyboard and wondering why it wasn’t showing up on the right screen. That’s when Kevin came up the stairs and made his Matrix joke.

My husband hates computers, the internet, and cell phones. Never mind that he now needs the computer to run his business; he has me to take care of that end. I also forced him to get a cell phone after he got a flat tire in Deer Park at 9:00 one night and had to walk three miles to find a working pay phone.

Our “best man”, Ted, who works in management for the software business, is up on all the latest technology. He laughs at Kevin’s beeper. “You have to make the technology work for you,” he says, as he lays his Blackberry on our kitchen table. A call comes in; he looks at the caller id and ignores it. “See?” Then he explains why “peoplepc” is not an acceptable email suffix for professionals and convinces me to switch over to Gmail.

Really I am an outdoor girl at heart. The computer is just a tool for my writing. I wish I could sit up in a maple tree, as I used to do when I was little, pen some stories into a notebook, and send them anonymously to a publisher, like Louisa May Alcott. Things don’t work like that anymore.

I used to think that it would be great to have a laptop and sit at the beach and write. But once I get there, I am happy not to have it with me. We sit on the white, rocky sand and stare into the face of a white pigeon. The sky is a light blue with puffy little white clouds here and there. Little boats sit beyond the buoys and I wonder who is on them. The older three kids plunge into the water and my three-year-old, shovel and pail in one hand, holds her other hand out to me. We go down to the water. She dares herself to go up to her neck and a speeding boat sends a wave that spills into her mouth.

“Are you okay?”

She laughs in response.

And I realize I haven’t coughed once since we got there.

“Be still and know that I am God!” Psalm 46:10

Moses before the Burning Bush
Domenico Feti, 1613-14
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Where would all the Faeries Go?

We decided to take an impromptu trip to visit relatives in Massachusetts this weekend. We took a different route on the way up, along the shoreline. It was the most ugly road I have ever traveled on. Although the ocean was less than a half-mile away, the landscape was marred by cement and machinery. My head was full of nostalgia and fanciful notions from reading the Anne of Green Gables series. In that time and place, one would walk for miles through the woods to get to a friend’s house. Technology was not present to interfere with social calls and the aesthetics of nature. I started thinking about faeries. If they could live on earth, where would they live? I looked in various groves of trees, trying to picture little pixies trying to make their abode there. How could they stand the noise and pollution? No, they would likely be pushed further and further north, quite possibly to Prince Edward Island.

[Note: I do love bridges and have included this painting of the Throgs Neck Bridge at Sunset because that is the bridge we took; it was the road we took through otherwise lovely Connecticut that spoiled things for me. ]

A watercolor by Antonio Masi, "Throgs Neck Bridge: Sunset.", 2006

A Child’s Garden

"A Child’s Garden", by Molly Dannenmaier, is full of beautiful, inspiring ideas of how to make the back yard come alive for children and the parents or grandparents who build the landscaping for them. Dannenmaier draws the reader into the child’s mind, calling up memories of how we viewed nature when we were small. She writes of children’s needs to be involved in nature: hearing, feeling, and seeing water; playing with rocks, sand, and dirt; climbing to great heights; learning about and respecting poisonous plants. I started to see my own landscape in a different way, and my head is now filled with ideas of how certain corners can be transformed into magical places for the children to discover. By the time I finish with my yard, there may be grandchildren here to explore and enjoy it.

For ordering information see the publishers website.