Lazy W Marie

Carpeing all the diems in semi-rural Oklahoma...xoxo

a happy, messy look back at 2021

Closing out the year 2021, I feel maybe more wide-eyed and open-hearted than ever in my life, which is wonderful. I also feel a bit weirded out by how quickly time has been passing. Lots of my friends feel this way, too, about the speeding clock, and theories abound about why this is happening. Whatever the reasons, our days and months seem to be gaining momentum. In the New Year, my remedy for this sensation will be to schedule in more free time, more protected white space for play and spontaneity, and more rest days that I can redeem however I need to at that time, trusting in my overall work product. Trusting that life can and should contain more wiggle room.

Looking back over the past twelve months, I am in awe of all the hard work and dazzled by all of the intense Love. I am deeply grateful for the relief sent our way, for the grace supplied to handle difficulties we have never handled before, and for the fresh inspiration. I feel a gorgeous weaving together of sincere effort and desire, and it is thrilling.

As last year began, we spent time with Handsome’s cousin, Shane, and his beautiful little family, while they were in Oklahoma to bury Shane’s dad, Wes. It was a profoundly sad time but a happy reunion too, and we were thankful everyone was healthy and safe enough to be together. During their stay, Oklahoma was blanketed by snow and the farm was without power for several days, so that was definitely a memory maker! We did our best to cling to New Year’s Eve traditions and have fun outdoors when possible, and we just covered each other in love.

During that visit, while cooking dinner for the group, I received a phone call from Jessica that changed everything. She and Alex had just decided to get married! The engagement was no surprise to us, but their timeline was: They set a date exactly two weeks from the date of that phone call, ha! So we were thrown immediately into some of the most joyful, also the most feverish, most love-drenched planning and farm beautification days ever. Jessica and Alex were the picture of young love and true, warm-hearted family love. They deserve the world. As I type this, these lovebirds are fast approaching their first anniversary!

Handsome and his team at the Public Utilities Division made history with their unrelenting work and fierce, talented attention during Oklahoma’s Polar Vortex and all of the precipitating (no pun intended) energy crises. It was a long, cold, challenging season for them, and I am so proud. He coined the saying, “We’ll keep them alive today so they can hate us tomorrow,” and my smart husband got to be on television press conferences with Oklahoma’s favorite ASL translator. Who remembers this guy?? He was amazing.

We celebrated Easter outdoors with our local family!! The tulips and daffodils were blooming, the sun emerged with extra early heat, and everyone brought their pups. I remember feeling hope for normalcy, something even bigger than the seasonal dose of excitement springtime delivers.

Eventually vaccines rolled out, and we were thankful to partake. Beyond thankful for our health and our family’s health, thankful for the preservation of life so far. We know intimately that not everyone has been so lucky.

Sometime during the warm months last year, I cannot remember exactly when, we finally met some longtime neighbors and struck up a new friendship. Rex and Cathy live down the road from us, and their German shepherd (Max) is a neighborhood celebrity. It was with the excuse that Max and Klaus become buddies that we started talking, and soon enough we all just clicked. It turns out that their (now grown) daughter grew up as best friends with the little girl who grew up here, in our house at the Lazy W (but long before it was the Lazy W, ha)! Rex and Cathy have quickly become two of our favorite people. A very happy development this year.

If I look back on the gardening year of 2021, I will remember mostly flowers. Lots of different lilies, hydrangeas, zinnias and marigolds of course, some sunflowers, shady beds full of soft impatiens, blooming sage, and even roses. Gosh so many roses! I will also remember the castor bean plants that my running friend Mike gifted us in the form of bizarre, prickly, sappy little seed pods. The plants are ultimately sky-scraping, elegant monsters. I will also remember the okra. Oh good grief, those plants produced three times per day all summer long! Okra and tomatoes were the bulk of our little farm’s food production this year. My focus was more on flowers, to make sure we had lots of bouquets for our vow renewal. It was a fun diversion, but I’ll get back to food in 2022.

2021 was the year that we almost lost Rick Astlee, the bully duck, thanks to an attack by Johnny Cash, the bully goose; but Rick convalesced in our bathtub for two weeks and survived to enjoy a happy summer with his guide duck, Mike Meyers Lemon. Klaus was enraptured, and we were relieved. It was also this year that our chickens enjoyed a free range experiment, which we will repeat after winter, once I have figured out how to protect my gardens better.

In spring, Lady Marigold celebrated her first year with us. She has grow daily into a bossy little hand-fed, spoiled rotten, circle-zooming miss fancy pants. We lubb her.

Our nieces and nephews insist on growing up. Chloe has her driver’s license? Connor is speaking Spanish??

Our own beautiful kids are healing and growing in their own ways, both with and without us, proving that we are only vessels or conduits for God’s Love, not the source. He is always the Source.

We learned so much about friendship and family and social evolution, about teamwork and thriving in harmony. Community has taken on new and deeper meaning, as I know many of you will agree.

We celebrated out twentieth wedding anniversary with an outdoor vow renewal, which was definitely postponed once and almost postponed twice, for monsoon-level rainstorms! We were surrounded by friends and family and could not have felt happier or more in love.

Not much travel this past year, despite having tried. Three good trips were all cancelled at the last minute due to covid outbreaks or upswings, but we barely pouted at all. It seems like life at home, on this farm, with each other, has become so nourishing and relaxing that we recharge just fine, right here. We did make one quick getaway to the Palo Duro Canyon area in the panhandle of Texas, which was absolutely enchanting. We enjoyed that quick visit so much, we intend to make a longer adventure of it soon. Rent a cabin, go for long hikes, pack our own groceries to cook, have some no-cell-service kind of romance. We love that it’s a Klaus-friendly trip.

All the hardscape improvements we made to the farm during the first year of pandemic have held up, and this year I think we mostly just added gravel. Lots and lots of gravel, ha! We also bought a zero-turn-radius riding lawn mower, which makes life so much easier. We also hosted the Master Gardeners for a second time at the end of summer, also nearly derailed by a freakish monsoon, but gosh that turned out to be a wonderful memory maker too.

The fifth annual Lazy W Talent Show was a huge success! We hosted it in October and called it “Fright Night,” and everyone brought the Halloween vibes! So much fun. That will go down in history for us.

Mom and Dad hosted Thanksgiving this year, and Gen was in town, wahoo! We were missing Jocelyn, Dante and Deaven, and Joe and Halee and their magical boys (stationed in Spain right now). But we ate their share of turkey and pecan pie and stayed fixed in gratitude for everything and everyone. I will remember Thanksgiving Week 2021 as one especially full of games and laughter, team efforts and shimmering affection for each other.

Christmas was overall the quietest holiday of the year, and honestly we needed it to be that way. It felt restful and intimate, and it gave us time to just soak up Jess and her beautiful little family, and we slept a lot that weekend. My heart has felt comforted and joyful, just as the carol offers.

I ran one speck less than 2,121 miles this year, which means absolutely nothing except that I stayed healthy and consistent, uninjured and very happy, and overall a bit stronger thanks to more regular gym days. I have actual running goals for 2022, wahoo!

Of course there have been heartaches, there always are, and there always will be. But I feel content. Well seasoned. I feel good despite the hard times, or maybe in part because of them. God has grown us so much this year.

Happy New Year, friends. I hope your pain is eased and your joy is rekindled. I hope your faith is stronger than ever. And I hope your dreams begin to come true right before your wide open eyes.

“Open yourself to every possibility,
for there is nothing your heart can imagine
that is not so.”
~This Tender Land,
William Kent Kreuger
XOXOXOXO

and just like that…

Just now while doing breakfast chores, I was praying for Jocelyn and something wonderful happened.

((an old photo of the boys with fresh hay…xoxo))

For several days I have been aggressively and tediously flaking hay for the bachelors from what is perhaps the most tightly wound large bale I have ever seen in my life. It is also wrapped in not wire, not netting, but twine, and lots and lots of it. It’s like a five year old wrapped a gift with cheap tape. The blue nylon twine is buried and criss-crossed in deep crevices throughout the hay, making the already tight spiral of tangled dry grass nearly impossible to loosen neatly. Every day is a slow unraveling task. Chipping and shredding, really. Generally this task is kind of fun, actually, I’m not complaining. Raking hay can be therapeutic, like collecting manure for compost or pulling weeds. It’s a repetitive motion and gentle physical exertion that makes it easy to get lost in thought, or prayer. But the twine has been a frustrating block.

So today I was chipping away, flaking off small, not pretty, tufts of hay to slowly collect into heaps for the boys’ breakfast, praying for Jocelyn. Praying for her to remember the best moments between us, from childhood to Colorado and everything in between. Praying for her to feel needed and appreciated and valued, to feel safe and warm when she thinks of home, to separate trauma and fact and fiction, to resist and replace the brainwashing, to grow whatever seeds of love and hope and health are in her heart. I swung my straight metal rake again and again, and suddenly the tines caught another strong, skinny bit of blue twine. So I stopped to cut it apart. (So much twine you guys.)

As soon as my scissors snapped the twine, it popped apart like a champagne cork! And a thick, fluffy, luxurious band of soft hay collapsed at my feet. I don’t know if you have ever felt that, the release of more hay than you needed, but it is wonderful. Hay falling at my feet is one of my favorite sensations, maybe because it is so clearly proof of lushness and abundance. Every day I hope it will happen, but as you might imagine, this particular large bale has been stingy with the magic.

Anyway, today it did happen. I couldn’t believe how much gorgeous, sweet smelling hay was being trapped by a single strand of blue nylon twine. It really doesn’t make sense. It hit my very cold toes (three cheers for wearing flip flops in December), and I stared at the now very lopsided large bale. Then I collected the food into my big green basket and called Chanta, Dusty, and Meh over to feast.

It hit my heart that God has worked this way in my life over and over again.

He has many times released fears or shame or toxic relationships, or simply erroneous thinking, in one powerful godly breath, thereby triggering cascades of goodness in my life.

And He can do this with my girl, too. He can release her from everything in one moment. All that goodness in her life can cascade again with the snapping apart of one lie or one dark thought or one influence or one circumstance. She feels far away but also very close right now. I hope that the blue nylon twines keeping her bound up are snapped away gradually, gradually, then all at once. She deserves absolute freedom.

((a very happy day on my first trip to visit her in Colorado))

I feel momentum building and a deep peace growing. Thank you so much for your love and continued prayers. Please let me know how we can be praying for you too! Tell me what blue twine needs cutting, so the hay can fall thickly at your feet.

“For I know the thoughts that I think toward you,
saith the Lord, thoughts of peace, and not of evil,
to give you an expected end.”
Jeremiah 29:11
XOXOXO

new aquarius moon, senses inventory

Today is Thursday, Februrary 11, 2021, this winter’s New Moon in Aquarius. According to my journal, it is Day 332 in “quarantine,” although that word has shifted meaning over the months. Nearly a year, though, since all this started. Amazing.

In Oklahoma we have just 36 days till spring and 63 days till danger of frost has passed. My friend Rose will like that number play. In the mean time, we are already bitter cold and bracing for an historic snow storm this weekend.

Earlier today, I spent a few minutes taking a Senses Inventory. It felt like a good day to mark the moment then deeply inhale fresh energy.

SEE: A stack of thank you cards I am writing for our Outreach projects. Two vases filled with dried wedding flowers, mostly roses. Verdant houseplants in almost every direction. Shiny clean mixing bowls drying on the kitchen counter. Handwritten notes from my friends Kelly, Lori, and Brittany. Brightly painted artwork. Snow and frost covering everything I see outside, in the south yard.

HEAR: A rooster crowing about either his breakfast or his love life, maybe both. Klaus snoring gently after a busy round of morning chores. My husband’s muffled voice filtering from his upstairs office, firm and authoritative, serious, on the verge of angry. (Edit to add: he was definitely angry.) Also, music from the kitchen, a rotation of Lana Del Rey and Billie Eilish.

TOUCH: Hot, tingly hands from scrubbing dishes. Legs bouncy and energetic, ready to run! Nose raw from constant Kleenex attention this week.

SMELL: Bleach cleaner, dish soap, freshly baked cinnamon pumpkin bread, and the cold. The cold has a fragrance today.

TASTE: Oily aftertaste of the unsalted pepitas and raisins I ate while baking earlier. Tepid water laced with liquid biotin drops, not quite citrusy, not too good.

THINK: Reflecting on a wonderful dream I had last night. Also thinking about Jocelyn’s first cabin in the mountains, the one she remodeled, and of the time I visited her in April but we got snowed in. We got donuts and made coffee twice and her houseplants were thriving. Later, we hiked on Trail Ridge Road by moonlight. All of Colorado’s magic was housed in her petite body. Today, here at the farm, feels like that day, and I can’t stop thinking about it. About her.

FEEL: I feel amorous, romantic, silly. Also widly hopeful about everything in the world that matters deeply, especially our family. Not the kind of hopeful that is gripping and determined, but rather, the floaty, shimmering, giggling kind of hopeful, like something wonderful is about to happen. I am also very excited for deep snow at the farm, movies, cuddling, and playing games all weekend.

Share details from one of your senses with me!

XOXOXOXO

“I knew it would happen today!”

Three seperate times this week, a question has found its way into my view, and I cannot resist exploring it with you:

What if you woke up to discover
that all of your prayers had been answered?

One version of this idea was related to health and fitness. I woke up feeling great, which led to being curious about how different my routine would look if every bodily niggle was healed, every aesthetic hope fulfilled, and all my energy topped off. Would I run more miles, or less, and how would other activities like pilates and yoga fit in, if I am moving to feel my best instead of solving problems? Would I go on more adventures instead of exercising, or would I still need that time alone?

Then I was indulging in how different our family will feel when Jocelyn rejoins us (again). How complete and alive we will be with her among us again. What a blinding joy that will be!

I hang onto the vision I had in December 2019, of her and Bridget walking up to the kitchen door on a sunny day. She is all smiles, her enormous brown eyes wet and bright, her sweet olive skin, equal parts woman and little girl. She opens the door tentatively, and we hug fiercely without missing a beat. Everything good floods in. All the love. All the colors. We are crying from laughing and laughing from hugging. Without reservation, she tells me everything she has been through these past few years, and I listen without giving advice. She sinks in. We missed each other so much. Bridget remembers us and brings BW rocks to fetch, and everything else falls away.

Jocelyn tells me that she can fix Dusty’s hoof if I want her to, and she gently chastises me for not riding Chanta like she knows I want to. We share new music and movies and cook dinner together. She likes that I still listen to the songs she gave me in Colorado, and she tells me all about her new romance. I do my best to relay my sorrow about her Dad. She is home forever this time.

Then.

I think about how much happier my husband is when his work is rewarding, how it’s not the exertion or the hours at the office or the extreme multitasking (he can handle anything) so much as it is the deep satisfaction of making a difference in the world and with his people. This is an ongoing miracle unfolding in our life, and I wonder how much better it still can be.

I am excited for post-pandemic family time, free socializing, hostessing, volunteering, travel, all of it. What will it feel like to throw a party again, to drive to New Orleans and the beach and to eat in restaurants? To annoy my friends again with attack hugs? So good.

We are just weeks away from true springtime, and that familiar knowledge, despite the arctic air headed for us this week, helps me feel some of this more concretely. The relief!

I can think of dozens more big miracles my heart craves and how it might feel to realize they have happened. That they are unfolding. Often when I am running at the lake or on trails, my mind is just playing movies, visualizing the fruition of our deepest hopes. It’s the fabric of prayer for me, the beautiful unfolding of all those petitions.

In fact, they are unfolding already. That is the root and truth of my faith. That everything is just a matter of time and trust. Everything expands and grows. Everything is subject to the power of Love, and on some level it already accomplished. Every good thing is very much worth the wait. Hang in there, friends.

“I knew it would happen today!”
~Shrek musical
XOXOXOXO

daughter dreams, blackberries, & wellness habits

Last night I dreamt that Jocelyn came home. It was a happy, lighthearted dream. Bridget was with her, and everything felt natural and smooth. Fearless. Complete. It was so seamless with reality that waking up required a few minutes of unraveling. Sometimes when I have dreamed about the girls during a long separation, I am emotionally wrecked for a while, at least for the day. This time, all day today, I have felt a new kind of buoyancy. I believe in my bones that the right time is fast approaching for us to reunite in a meaningful way. As exciting as that is, I am in no hurry. I most of all want it to be right for her.

At one minute past 6 a.m., Klaus and I slipped outside to watch the morning take hold. Though cloudless at that hour, the sky was visibly dome like, its pastel spread dazzling and saturated with humidity. We launched into the front field, taking every curve of the new Enchanted Path. The mown-flat walkway was dewy, the ground both hard and spongy, yielding, the feathery native grasses as high as my shoulders now, begging to be touched. Wildflowers continue their bloom display, and I am ready to scatter more seeds.

The moon hung on the southwest corner of the farm, waning by almost a quarter on this 117th day of quarantine. It drew me over to the horses, who arrived yawning and snuffling for breakfast. They will need extra fly spray today.

The squash blossoms were already awake, riotous, trembling with dozens of industrious honeybees. No monster vegetables to harvest yet this morning, but having unburdened the vines this week, and having fed and watered them, we will find more soon.

We fed the front coop flock and collected seven heavy eggs, three of them so recently produced they were still hot to the touch. By the time we meandered back around the house to feed Romulus and his fleecy companion, Handsome had stepped outside. The workday was about to begin in earnest. Every bird, both wild and domestic, was roused and singing.

On my run a few hours later (mostly trails, very sweaty, supremely refreshing), I saw the local high school Cross Country team warming up. This always reminds me of Jocelyn and the one year she was able to run for McGuinness. She is such a talented runner, a natural athlete. I wonder if she knows that a big part of why I started running was to feel modestly connected to her during our longest separation.

Also on my run, I saw a middle aged woman (younger than me but not my much) and a teenaged boy. They had stopped running, both leaning over, hands on knees. I had the distinct impression of either a recent or an impending vomit event. I slipped an earbud out of my greasy right ear and asked the pair, because I couldn’t really tell who was suffering more, “Are you ok?” The woman answered with a weak but warm smile, “We’re just having a pep talk.” We nodded briefly at each other, and I ran on. I wondered actively for the next 3 miles who was giving and who was receiving said pep talk. Mostly I was happy they had each other. My own pep talks are always just between me and myself and it can make me feel crazy.

This big bowl of sweet, ripe, perfect black berries is poised and ready for either a cobbler or a syrup recipe or maybe some jelly. What would you do with them? I am amazed by the productivity of my two little vines this year. And I eat them constantly while gardening! This is just what actually made it to the fridge.

I have been thinking lots about a “Wellness Toolbox” concept, and I hope that soon you will join me in a long conversation about that. Today, though, in case you need it, I want to share a list of fundamentals offered by Steve Magness, author of both Peak Performance (which I have purchased but not yet read) and The Passion Paradox, which I devoured this past winter alongside Atomic Habits (different author). Magness imparts some very adaptable wisdom that has been especially useful to me during this weird and shifting pandemic season. Here are notes from my journal:

Take what you want, leave what you don’t. But I believe that most of us can benefit from these fundamental habits, no matter what the unknowns are:

  1. Focus on what you can control.
  2. Move your body regularly.
  3. Spend time in nature.
  4. Lower expectations.
  5. Create a routine.
  6. Practice optimism grounded in reality.
  7. Mood follows action.

Friends, thank you for your tomato recipe ideas yesterday! I shared a few pounds of especially pretty ones with our new neighbors, and I am excited to dive into some for our own pleasure, too.

Happy Thursday night!!

I want to remain all my life
a devout lover of reality
while seeking Spirit
XOXOXOXO