“True faith drops its letter in the post office box and lets it go. Distrust holds on to a corner of it and wonders that the answer never comes.”
That line in Streams in the Desert plunged me into deeper thoughts on faith, and the word streams in the book’s title inspired me at 9:39 last night into the kind of writing that mimics human thought. Ah, stream of consciousness writing! How very early 20th-century Modernist movement of me.
I would’ve given author James Joyce—a master of the writing style—more thought, but I’ve been consumed with practical matters this week, scheming about how to stretch our family’s dollars. This morning during a team meeting at work that started with the icebreaker question, “What made you smile this week?”, I felt like a commercial.
“I found out we can save hundreds a month by switching our auto insurance to Progressive.”
My smile-inducing (for me) statement didn’t induce smiles in anyone else. Flat affects all around.
Lest you think most of my job is made up of icebreakers, it kind of is. And I wonder where the term icebreaker came from in the first place, but I’m too tired to look it up. I will, however, look up the video Flicka sent our family a few days ago with footage from the start of the Sea-Ice Marathon of 2024 in Luleå (No, she didn’t go to Sweden. She just shared the clip with us from her cushy spot in the living room.) I watched it again and noted the glare ice under the runners’ feet. Scary and cold. So cold. Like those ice baths everyone but me is taking these days.
And now I’m back in the arena in Thief River Falls where I took skating lessons as a kid. I glided out onto the rink one day way back when, but the pride I felt at first swish evaporated. My feet slid around under me like nothing I ever knew. No precision, no control. What was wrong with my skates? Or was something amiss in me? Half-way across the rink, I finally looked at my feet. My skate guards still clung to my blades. Just an oversight. No big deal. Only the end of the world because everyone else saw it too.
But enough icy thoughts. It’s spring.
A few in our neighborhood adhere to No Mow May and have the signs (and long grass) in their yards to prove it. They let the grass and weeds grow for the month to provide food and shelter for essential pollinators, but I heard somewhere those creatures will likely get shredded up during the first mow of the season.
And now I wonder when our 14-year-old neighbor—I guess he’s probably fifteen by now—will come over to get our in-ground sprinklers going again. He proffered his services last year, claiming he could get the system, which we didn’t know we had, repaired and running and plant the proper grass seed to eradicate our pesky bare spots out front. He delivered, dazzling us with irrigation talents we learned he picked up through YouTube when he was ten.
Last year, this young businessman—with multiple clients in the neighborhood—assessed our bleak-at-first lawn situation with a quiet authority. Then he pedaled off on his bike to buy supplies at Menards, keeping his work at our place to daylight hours, since his mom didn’t let him go out after dark, even to diagnose why geysers shot out of our lawn once during the night back at the beginning. His daytime customer service was impeccable, though, and when Dicka crushed a sprinkler head with her car while backing out of the driveway, he responded to my text for help in six minutes and had the head replaced in twenty.
This might be the point in the narrative when a traditional writer would say, “But I digress,” but that’s exactly my goal today. And it’s so breezy, this meandering way of writing, I might practice it more often to your chagrin. Or delight. You can choose.
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*Names in this blog have been changed to protect my family, neighbors, and friends in the neighborhood, and in a nod of appreciation to the beloved Swedish author Maj Lindman, I’ve renamed my three blondies Flicka, Ricka, and Dicka.