Keeping An Eye Out for Blue Skies

an ordinary, extraordinary birthday + unicorns

Sep 03, 2023

Issue #33/ Welcome to Good and Beautiful Things, thanks so much for joining me in this space. I love making stuff, sometimes with words, sometimes with ink and paint. This weekly newsletter is a collage of both.

Share Good and Beautiful Things

A few weeks ago I shared my discovery that the beautiful fields I’d enjoyed all summer during my bike rides had been mowed to the ground. In that newsletter, I wrote about how the sudden absence of those fields echoed the emptying of my house as two of my kids moved out for college.

For about a week I could see the evidence of the erasure of the fields whenever I took a bike ride. The severed grass turned brown, cutting a line along the edge of the field. On my next ride, the brown mulch had been gathered into hay bales scattered across the field. Nothing about these discarded piles reminded me of the romanticism found in Monet’s colorful haystacks.

The day we moved my son into his dorm I came down with a cold and about a week went by before I could take another bike ride.

When I returned to my bike route I was surprised to see the bales of hay had been removed and the line that separated the fields had disappeared. It was impossible to tell that the fields had ever been different unless you’d seen them earlier this summer in their full glory.

As I continued on my ride, I thought about my heart and decided that it was regenerating at a slower pace than the fields around me. This past week I’ve walked through the house and noticed the open doors of the two empty bedrooms late at night while my husband and daughter slept.

The house is quiet in a very noisy way right now.

***

In my previous newsletter,

Sarah Bahiraei

remarked in the comments that even in the photo of the shorn fields the blue sky was beautiful. It was a helpful reminder of the beauty possible even when the cracks of the heart have yet to catch up with the pace of the resilient earth. In fact, my experience with good and beautiful things in the midst of life’s challenges is largely how this newsletter got its name.

So for this issue, I went looking for blue skies and I didn’t have to look hard.

***

The Birthday I didn’t Celebrate in France

As I shared in my last newsletter, I happened to be in France last year on my birthday as we accompanied our daughter to her study abroad program. That was a special day, maybe even a once-in-a-lifetime kind of special.

But due to the expense of the trip, only half of our family went to France and the other three kids had to stay home. It was the first birthday I celebrated apart from the rest of the family. I also knew that at the end of the trip, we’d be saying goodbye to our daughter for the next ten months. So, yes, it was an epic celebration because of the location, but it was also bittersweet.

A friend teased me after I posted the newsletter about the trip to France, “I look forward to your Substack review of this year’s birthday. Sketches of Kleenex boxes, unopened cough syrup, and empty nests?”

Fresh from the recent departures of our kids and only just clear of the fevers and sickness that swept over our reduced household last week, we hobbled into this birthday.

Attempting to leave our germs at home, we gathered with the rest of the kids at the apartment that our two oldest daughters share together. The girls surprised me with a banner of balloons strung across the balcony and greeted me wearing unicorn party hats. We feasted on homemade chicken curry crepes and salad, along with cupcakes from my favorite little store. It was an evening of eating and laughing and catching up on the first week of school.

The cupcakes aren’t fancy, the focus is all on the flavor. The strawberry cupcake has real strawberries in the cake and in the frosting. After taking a poll on my birthday, strawberry is the winner with chocolate coming in second.

I quietly marveled that these were my people, that I’ve been blessed to share my life with them. I thanked the Lord that we were all together this year. The biggest gift was knowing that everyone would be nearby, at least for this next school year.

Later that night I opened the note one of my daughters had written me:

“The other day we were reminiscing about your last birthday at Étretat. Of course, we’d all rather be there right now, but honestly what matters most about this day is that I get to spend time with you. Right now, all of us are growing up fast and “leaving” for jobs and college…However, today more than ever, I hope you know that each of us loves you so much, and no distance outside of our childhood home can change how close our family is.”

On the night of my 46th birthday, I found my blue skies.

Can a birthday of unicorn hats and coughing fits beat a birthday in France?

Anything’s possible.