Clouds

Generally speaking, if it's not raining, it's clouds like these, and every time I see them I want to scream, or tell everyone I know, or write a blog post, or a status update on my wife's facebook, or just sit and look, or take lots of photos, and I think my wife and kids get tired of me saying, "Look! Did you see those?! Man!"

So I took a photo on my cell phone while driving, and I will share it just this once, and after that, I'll do my best to contain myself. Unfortunately, I happened to take a photo of the sun, which cell phone cameras aren't really equipped to handle, and so you can't see the farmland that's just as beautiful as the clouds, or the blueness of the sky for that matter, but you get the idea.

In the meantime, best wishes to all of you dealing with Sandy.

feisty

still loving this, still wishing i had been there...

Felt

I opened a book of poetry tonight. I found this note taped on the inside cover:

"Hi Nate, it's me...your book.
I was getting bored just sitting on the shelf so I decided to visit Quakertown, while there I met a girl named Olivia, she believes in God and reads her bible, but doesn't take part in corporate worship, I thought maybe I could help her, then it got cold, so I hunkered down for the winter...
When spring came every flower petal and budding branch reminded me of home, it was hard to leave but I knew the time had come, I've had quite enough adventure for one year. I'm a little bit older, a bit wiser."

Aside from a loving wife and understanding friends, apart from finally adding Romans 8:29 to Romans 8:28, there were two things that got me through two of the hardest years of my life. Six Parts Seven and a few books of poetry. I revisited those things tonight, not because I am depressed, at least not tonight, but simply because I wanted to relax.

And I was reminded again how, like this book that took a year long adventure to encourage meandering Christians in Quakertown, poetry can sort of take on a life of it's own, pointing upward, onward, wrestling with words for grasping at ideas, feeling, moving, revealing, and balancing tensions between the tug of already and the push of not yet. And looking back that's a lot of what I needed in those years, something to tell me there was a world bigger than the one in which I was momentarily trapped, but it's a need that doesn't quite go away.

There are some lines that inexplicably grab you. Sometimes dissecting and analyzing and theorizing pays off and gets somewhere, but most times poetry is just simply felt. Like a Six Parts Seven song.

And I guess this is me trying to communicate that feeling, those feelings, without doing the poet's job of laboring, editing, revising, rewriting. No, this is just a brief tribute before going to bed. An odd way of saying thank you.

Mix Tape: Blue Ridge Parkway in Autumn

I got into Fleet Foxes reluctantly. I wasn't convinced at first. I heard the hype, and it eventually convinced me to pick up the record, and I grew to really enjoy them. But it wasn't love at first sight.

One of their older songs says something about the Blue Ridge Parkway. I forget the line, really, I just know they sing it a few times. And so when my little family spent an autumn in North Carolina, and we drove quite a few miles on that very Blue Ridge Parkway, this was the song I sang over and over. It didn't matter that we did not have the CD nor the iPod on the car, the song in my head was enough. And it was perfect.

If Bon Iver sounds like an isolated winter cabin, and Andrew Bird sounds like sky and ocean, then Fleet Foxes sound like the Blue Ridge Parkway in Autumn. And that's exactly why I pulled their disc off the shelf again the other day when we went to go apple picking.

What's strange is that they don't sound just like the Appalachian mountains. They sound like Simon and Garfunkel singing as medieval minstrels in a walled and moated city located in the Appalachian mountains. And to pull off that sound, to sell records with that sound, that takes some talent.

With that in mind and autumn at hand, here's my favorite moment "Someone You'd Admire" on their most recent record Helplessness Blues.

Felicitations !

A man I've known for 26 years got married in his backyard on the other side of the ocean today. And we were there, being held, on a lap, on a hay bale.
Thanks, Skype! Congratulations Dan and Natalie!

Seasonal Affective Disorders

If France didn't have a place to pick apples my seasonal affective disorder would start a season early.

In describing American culture to a foreigner, one would naturally describe holiday traditions, perhaps in particular our unique holidays like Halloween and Thanksgiving. But one would most likely neglect mentioning the two-month-long celebration that is autumn, where we rejoice and revel in all things pumpkin, all things spice, all things crisp, all things orangey-yellowish-red, all things harvest, all things country, all things quaint. The flavored coffee, the yankee candle, the flannel shirt. We'd neglect to mention it because it has somehow become so natural, so much a part of us and our region, and the fact that it's not a special day but an entire season. But watching celebratory status updates and album uploads starting in mid-September from afar, one realizes just how peculiar it all is. It's a type of seasonal affective disorder in its own right.

France has attempted to import pieces of Halloween (or the States have attempted to export?) with minimal success. The orchards sell pumpkins, warning they are the type not for eating just for decoration, and hold a few jack-o-lantern workshops. But it all remains far from being ubiquitous. The stores do sell pumpkin soup all year round, found in the extensive boxed-soup aisle, from which the Americans could learn a few things, because it all blows Campbells out of the water.

So I don't know when apple-picking became a family tradition, but it has, and its one we've been able to keep up in France, and it seems to make up for all the missing things. Yesterday morning clouds gave way to a clear blue sky, the only good apple-picking weather we've seen in weeks. An emergency room visit delayed our departure time, but we were able to go nonetheless. As we parked we attempted to ignore the dark clouds on the horizon. We hiked to the back of the orchard for the Braeburns (which can be conserved up to 8 months and used in winter or spring salads) and the Granny Smiths (ideal for tartes aux pommes). The boys enjoyed their wheel-barrow rides and helped to pick, each one of us wearing a smile. It was a quick affair as the clouds moved closer, and as our crate was filled the drizzle began, and we shuffled all the way back to the entrance. The kid, hood up, said, "Let's go straight home and have an apple party and invite lots of people." E stopped to pick some flowers (pay by the kilo) as the drizzle gave way to a downpour, and the downpour gave way to an all-out hail storm. Bizarre, but kind of the meteorological norm around here. We huddled under an overhang and waited for it to pass before paying. The hail storm gave way to an intensely bright rainbow--probably the fourth or fifth we've seen in the past month--and the rainbow gave way to completely clear blue sky on the drive home. We listened to The Album Leaf and Mumford and Sons in the car, because they seemed most appropriate.

There were no hay rides, no scarecrows, and it was not quite the perfect picturesque fall day that our home culture insists upon, but regardless, it satisfies a need and manages to stave off the throes of disorder, and for those things, we can't complain at all

It's not a bad gig.

Free Stuff

I don't want to be the guy to remind you Christmas is coming before we've even celebrated Fall, but I do want to be the guy that shares free stuff, and so:

That Advent book I contributed to last year is available as a free e-book download Friday the 5th and Saturday the 6th. Warm up your preferred device and download away!

If you remember liking it last year or discover you like it after downloading, why not say so on Amazon's page? It's as easy as clicking on "Writing a Customer Review." (If you feel dishonest giving it 5 stars, that's OK, none of us will be mad at you, especially those of us who were elementary teachers and know a thing or two about the perils of grade inflation.)

While we're on the topic, did you hear that Sufjan's releasing ANOTHER CHRISTMAS BOX SET THIS YEAR?!?!?!?!? I wouldn't hold out for any free downloads on that one though...