A Good Day to be Content

On chasing sunshine and desirable abodes

A friend drove south with her husband to spend winter on a Mexican beach. She does this every year, and her sisters in Christ usually get texts of outdoor cantinas, beautiful blue waters, and reports of what the temperature is (80 degrees, last I heard).

I think about this idea of heading south, today, when the temperature outside is 22 degrees and the sun is shrouded behind voluminous clouds, turning our entire woods into gray shadows. I’m thankful for the wood heating (most of) our home, our deep and cozy comforters, and endless pots of soup, but the feel of warm sunshine upon my face and penetrating my bones mercilessly beckons me like my tabby to flattened and tattered catnip.

My husband and I moved to the Pacific Northwest almost three decades ago, when we were young and foolish enough to simply decide to do so without any sense of security whatsoever, including a means of employment. We simply knew we wanted fresh air, salt water, mountains and greenery. We also wanted to get away from concrete, smog, traffic and drama. We had no idea what awaited us: wild salads, bulk foods, and salmon. Alternative medicine, foraging, and artists and farmers and musicians and friends who lived next door. Living on acreage, living in cabins, living on waterfront. Having lots of babies (home births, hospital births, almost in the car births, natural births, emergency births, thankfully only one midwife-abandonment birth…), losing at least one baby, and delivering and welcoming not one, but two girls, with Down syndrome. Then, feeding and cleaning and homeschooling them all, and marrying the first one off in a red and chilly metal barn on an autumnal day with no one but immediate family present. We didn’t know an enormous sumac tree would try to kill us in our van, or that we’d have to shoot our savage dog, or that we’d have to ride out and hopefully survive the insanity of a so-called pandemic with our small business (I’m sorry, I really really tried not to put “so-called” there). We also didn’t know that we’d have to pack up and move seven times more in those 28 years, or that—the best mostest beautifulest wonder of wonders ever known to anyone at all on earth—Jesus would call ME and make me His own.

If I had read that previous paragraph before packing up the big yellow truck, I would have cancelled everything and climbed back into bed, rewatched every Thursday night sitcom, and simply gone back to teaching in my own classroom with thirty-four rowdy ten year olds for the rest of my life in a state that offered ceaseless sunshine. It wouldn’t matter that blessings were promised to be intermingled with trials; the whole thing simply sounds a frightening (or exhilarating, depending) ride on an abandoned, antique Matterhorn. Hand over the remote.

That’s the thing with chasing after an idolized life. No matter where the sun shines, sunburns follow. No matter where you live, where you go, what you do (or what you don’t), you can’t avoid sitting with or taking your own sinful self with you. You can’t control the evil other people do, natural catastrophes, who is ruling at the moment, what the government does (and doesn’t) do, or how much rain falls out of the sky (well, I guess that depends on whom you ask). Best, methinks, to choose what you can choose within the realm of living as authentic a life you can that is married to your values and to the people you love, and leave the results to Whom every result results, whether you’re staying put or packing up for a change in scenery.

As for me, I’m still considering what a migration down south might look like, whether for a few days or a few decades. For the time being, however, the winter air is fresh and crisp, the whiff of surrounding cedar still smells intoxicating, and the kettle is steaming upon the wood stove. It’s a good day to be content.