Angela At-Large

Tag: prose

  • pancakes and bacon

    pancakes and bacon

    My mom poked her head out the back door this morning to see the sunrise while I was sitting on the porch with my coffee, trying to be a Foreboding Presence to the robins who keep wanting to build a nest over the barbecue grill. Today is the weekend for her, and she likes to make big breakfasts on days like today but I at least got the coffee started since I was up first.

    It’s little moments like these that make me grateful to live with my parents. No one I’ve met personally has ever given me grief for this, but you see a lot of disparaging things online about my generation and how we have no work ethic and eat too much avocado toast and need to move back home so mommy and daddy can support us.

    But I wonder if the people who say those belittling things aren’t actually envious of those of us who have found and re-formed community with our families of origin. Of the support we offer one another, not transactionally but from a place of love and care and mutual respect. Of the healing we have found because we’ve all grown as people in the years we’ve been apart, and in the new years we now have together. Of the years ahead that I get to spend with them before they go Home.

    So write your articles, make your jokes. I’m gonna go inside and see if there’s pancakes and bacon.
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    Accessibility description: The sun shines brightly behind an apple tree several hours after climbing over the Midwestern horizon. A red brick porch column lines the right side of the frame, connecting to a brick wall lining the bottom of the frame. The author’s camper van sits in the grass glistening with dew. There’s actually a gravel driveway under there but nature got ahead of them last year and it’s overgrown. Add that to the list of neverending spring chores.

  • waiting for winter

    waiting for winter

    The fields are bare now, ready to sleep for the long winter. We cook more soups as temperatures drop, watch more tv as the nights take up more hours of the earth’s rotation. I knit stitches on a sweater here, a hat there; pick up my phone to tap out thoughts to copy into a draft later. The work of life continues, but indoors and inwardly. It is a soft work, in which repentance and rest will be our salvation; in quietness and trust will be our strength (Isa. 30:15).

  • on being still

    pink clouds settling into the night

    There’s a certain smell to a late-summer Midwest evening; it stirs up from under your feet when you walk along the fields. Humidity radiates off of the corn with the residual heat of the day. Cicadas scream at you from the maple trees, making sure you know they have accomplished the Very Great Feat of bursting out of their crispy brown shells. Frogs chirp between the cattails as pink clouds fade into a navy blue sky. Fireflies and stars gently blink their way into being, joining the symphony of distant horses neighing, highways and byways whining with 18 wheelers, and trains singing their siren song. If ever there is a time to live in the moment, it is this.

  • still summer evening

    open fields, open skies

    This is one of my favorite summer hours–when the sun casts long shadows on the earth with hours of daylight still left in the sky, the winds calm and ever so gently rustling leaves high in the treetops, the temperature perfect enough to be comfortable in shorts or pants, T-shirt or tank top.

    These are the hours for laying in a hammock with a book, taking a leisurely bike ride down an empty road, firing up the grill for a midsummer barbecue. These are the hours when it is easy to feel joyful and at peace. These are the hours when the soul can be at rest.

  • solidly spring

    today’s Coffee Drinking Spot

    The northern hemisphere has finally shifted into warmer days. In the Midwest, it means hearing the constant rumble of tractors from every corner of the compass, plowing and planting and spraying the fields for this year’s round of crops. City and suburban gardeners also venture out to local nurseries and big box stores to pick up seedlings and fresh bags of potting soil for their own vegetable patches and flower beds.

    It is only mid-morning, but the sun is already well into the sky when I step out the door with my first cup of coffee. European starlings, exiled from their native range 160 years ago, chatter noisily in the maple tree above my head. It’s not their fault they’re here, so I hate to evict them…but if I let them stay, they will bully away the native birds that have also chosen this plot of land to call home–so the nest must go. After, of course, another cup of coffee.

  • give us this day

    Spring comes a little earlier at my current Indiana latitude than the southern shores of Lake Ontario where I most recently lived. But, winter certainly wants to make sure we don’t forget about it too easily. The weather is positively gross today — cold, heavy raindrops slopping themselves onto the earth with no regard for how saturated the ground already is from last week’s rainstorms.

    Resting feels easier to justify on days like these, since it’s not like you can go outside and dig in the garden or chop up firewood, unless you like being cold and soaked to the bone. When the wind howls through the corners of the screen door and the temps dance erratically around the freezing point, your bones just know it’s a day for indoor chores and leisure. Wash the dishes, read a book. Pull freshly fluffed blankets out of the hot dryer and take a nap. This is the bread for today, and it is very good.