Lazy W Marie

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

friday 5 at the farm, april 1, 2022

Hello friends, and happy Friday to you! Spring has 100% sprung at the farm, and I am staying pretty busy these days. As usual I have more stories to share than time to write them, but how about an old fashioned Friday 5 post, just to timestamp?

(1) SCARLETT: As of today, our precious adopted calf has officially been with us for four weeks. I could tell you at least thirteen stories from every single one of those days, she has so generously filled our home with love and dimension. She has the sweetest, most trusting, most innocent spirit (with eyes to match), and her frostbite injuries don’t seem to faze her too much (more updates on her in a separate post). Happy one month at the W, Little Miss!

(2) GARDENS & PROPERTY FACELIFTS: I can say with confidence and excitement that spring has sprung here. The redbuds and fruit trees are frilled with bright, tissue paper blossoms, the tulips and daffodils are showing off their Easter best, the hydrangeas and blackberry vines have sprouted tentative little green leaves, and one room of our house is overtaken with seed trays, heat mats, and grow lights. The seed sowing, misting, watching, reorienting, and misting again has been fun. I love the rush of “new life” energy this time of year. Outdoors, besides garden cleanup and planting a few beds of leafy greens and snow peas, I have enjoyed flipping, emptying, and refilling the three compost systems as often as natural decomposition allows it. A few days ago I discovered baby snakes had hatched in one compost bin, which is always a sure sign that warmth is here to stay. Handsome has been moving sapling pine trees to a new wildflower meadow for a privacy screen, and he is reconfiguring some of the pathways and driveways leading from the gravel drive to the lawn near the yurt, hoping to make circling through easier and prettier. Also, on a whim last weekend, he painted two large garage doors glossy black, to match other accents on our house and car shop. It looks so much better, I can’t believe we didn’t do that years ago! Love the black with our turquoise front door and lots of garden color, especially right now while the Jane magnolia is in bloom.

(3) SHEPPS: Velvet and Lincoln are visiting the farm this week, and we have been having some fun! They are all aging slowly and appreciate a good nap (as pictured below), but between naps they still play and romp with lots of puppy energy. Velvet has delighted us with a brand new surge of affection for Handsome, a privilege for which he has been bargaining all these (nearly) seven years.

(4) BOOKS: Because I am elbow deep in two heftier than usual writing projects, I am not reading anything new right now. Instead, in spare moments, I am rereading chunks of The Well Gardened Mind by Dr. Sue Stuart Smith. Chapter six is especially mouthwatering, all about the culture of gardening versus farming and the value of growing things for pleasure before necessity. Gardening to thrive, in other words, not merely survive. It’s a theme popping up everywhere I look lately, and it feels important. In a few weeks we will be hosting a dinner discussion for The Book of Hope. Very excited about that.

(5) CAR SHOW: Last weekend we (meaning my husband, ha! but I did bring donuts and a picnic and keep Klaus entertained) helped our friend’s daughter and her college group host a charity car show in Edmond. It was the most beautiful day to be outdoors, and we so enjoyed seeing car show friends we hadn’t seen in a while. He trailered the Batmobile fir display, too, which is always a good time. The group did an excellent job pulling everything together, and they raised several hundred dollars for their school’s campaign to benefit the Children’s Miracle Network. Hopefully it was the first of not only their ongoing car show efforts but also our own packed car show season. We have really missed it these past two years!

Okay friends, what’s going on in your world? Are you primed and ready to grow something beautiful this year? Are you deep cleaning your house or maybe wrapping up spring break? What are you reading these days?

Thanks for checking in. See you soon for Scarlett stories and a brand new interview.

Redeem the Time
XOXOXOXO

checking in post equinox

Friends, happy springtime. We made it! Barring the very real possibility of a frosty morning here and there, Oklahoma is on the cheerful upswing towards warmth and rebirth. Today we are drinking in a much needed gentle rainfall, windows open and a cleansing breeze combing through our senses. Clover patches are overtaking the dead lawns. Trees have leaf buds dotting their naked branches. Daffodils assure us that Old Man Winter had his rightful turn and is once again retreating.

Gardeners everywhere are either tending tray after tray of seedlings in their warmest interior rooms or already raking clean their flower beds and ruminating over their raised gardens for planting this year’s treasures. Will food prevail in 2022, to combat the price of groceries, or will more people grow flowers to celebrate a return to life and liberty? How will you pursue your gardening happiness?

((basil sprouts indoors, grown from last year’s seed))

For me, the answer is both, with a heavy lean to all things kitchen. I am also very excited to be actively mentoring a few friends plus Jessica and Alex for a big round of first time garden growers. This is a life pleasure I never knew to anticipate! Maybe the only thing more fun than growing my own garden is helping loved ones grow theirs.

I hope you’ll tune in again in the next few days. I have some stories to share about Miss Scarlett, our rescue calf. I have been sharing quite a bit about her on Facebook and Instagram, but right here on the blog will be a fun place to record more detailed updates for posterity. I also have a brand new interview to share, this one not about Pandemic, and the subject is our very own Handsome, aka BW, aka Farm Daddy, aka Director and Sir and brother and friend to so many. My husband!! I am so excited for this project, but I want it to be clean and sooth when I share it.

Until then, I will be writing stories and potting up seedlings, cleaning oak-leaf-filled garden beds and scrubbing dirty concrete floors. Feeding chickens and filling compost boxes, definitely making bottles for an unbelievably sweet baby cow. Keeping Klaus entertained but not reading much, not this week. In spare moments I have been rereading highlights from The Well Gardened Mind and drawing all kinds of fresh inspiration from that. I’ll find a new book once these two writing projects are complete.

((scarlett and her milk bubbles mouth))

What are you up to this week?

“The return of spring each year
can be endlessly relied on,
and in not dying when we die, we have a sense
of goodness going forward.
This is the garden’s most enduring consolation.”
~Dr. Sue Stuart Smith
The Well Gardened Mind
XOXOXOXO

the thank you habit that helps me

For the past several days I have been employing an old standby habit, something that felt awkward at first but then got me through a crisis when my girls were toddlers, and these recent days it has felt luscious. I call it the Thank You Habit: While still lying in bed, in the dark, before speaking to anyone or even checking the time, before my feet hit the carpeted floor, I start silently saying thank you for as much as I can think of.

I let my mind float from person to person in my life and say thank you for them, then thank you for every modern convenience and insane material comfort we have, for the specific problems we overcame the day before and for the satisfying goals we met, thank you for the food I know is in the kitchen waiting to be prepared (and for the coffee that is probably brewing automatically at that moment), for the animals outside who trust me to meet their daily needs and for the supplies I have available to make my job so pleasant.

I say thank you for the hundreds of miracles we have witnessed over the years, as they come randomly to mind (these will gain momentum if you allow them to!), and thank you for the miracles still on their way. Thank you for my husband’s job which provides not just abundance in the practical sense but also abundance for the state of Oklahoma, for the people on his team, and for him as a person who was born to do this work and much more. Thank you that both of my girls are breathing and have hope, beauty and spiritual gifts to develop, despite their intense grief. I say thank you that both of my parents are alive and nearby, and that I enjoy true adult friendships with every single one of my siblings. These are blessings that only few of my friends have, and the older I get the more I see them as wild, amazing gifts.

thick night snow, moonglow, & a flashlight path…
I believe some moments of deliberate thanksgiving
can slice through the dark just like this

Before even standing up, I say thank you to God for the day ahead, for the problems we will inevitably face, because I know He has help available, and I know that in facing them we always emerge stronger. I tell Him how excited I am to see what kind of sunrise he has designed that day (I imagine Him staying up all night like an artist feverishly painting, waiting to display His new work), and thank you for what I will learn or enjoy on my run, and for what random surprises might happen. Thank you for the colorful fresh eggs our hens will lay. Thank you for the phone calls and texts with loved ones I might receive or make, thank you for the many people my sister will help that day and for the students at school and just as much as my mind will collect. Thank you for every hour coming, for every scrap of grace I will be afforded in the new day. Thank you for the near misses and close calls, for crises averted (there are many, you know).

This is just paving the way ahead with generous rivers of heartfelt gratitude, a way of attaching my day and my mind to the best possible outcomes.

This habit may sound goofy or trite, but I promise you it will feel smoother and more natural the more you practice it. After a couple of days, it tends to give me a glowy buoyancy, an inner sense of expectation that good things actually are coming. After this predawn ritual, I often catch myself throughout the rest of that day taking mental notes, “Oohh, tomorrow morning you can say thank you for that! That was cool.” This thought of course just sparks a midday thank you fest, which feels wonderful.

What this habit does not do is perfectly insulate me from dark thoughts or bad attitudes, for slipping emotionally from faith into fear. I am still susceptible to all of these errors and more; but the ongoing habit of saying thank you can even permeate this very real part of life: “Thank you for this frustrating challenge, thank you for this important relationship that may not come easily to me right now, but I know you are growing me here. Thank you for this deep pain, because it shows met how deeply I feel love, and it reminds me to be more loving. Thank you for the dreary landscape that makes me crave color, because I know you have built in this season of rest for a purpose, and I know this appetite for new life will help me enjoy springtime so much more. Thank you for this anger that awakens my protectiveness, and thank you for absorbing it cooling me down before I lashed out.”

If you try this one day and find your mind blocked or your words jammed up, or maybe you are in such abject pain that you cannot fathom a sincere thank you, I believe in my heart that is okay, too. This is not meant to be a saccharine exercise. I encourage you to try privately thinking only the words thank you a few times in a row, with no expectations or embellishments, and breathe deeply and say it again, while you are still in bed. Just rest for a moment longer before lunging desperately and painfully into your day. Whatever you face next, you have taken control of your energy for a moment. You have set the tone.

You know this drill, friends. We all know it in different expressions.

I just wanted to share my version as this brand new year takes hold, because the daily, hourly, private practice has helped me tremendously. My husband and I are facing some mammoth stressors lately, as I know you certainly are, and we are still enduring the same family heartaches as ever, still praying and watching for signs and still hoping for the next homecoming. Saying thank you ahead of time keeps me both tempered and lively. It keeps me happily tuned into good news, instead of staying vigilant, waiting for the next shoe to drop; and it helps me feel like the Universe is wired to my advantage, if that makes sense. That feeling that God is on your side, as silly as it may seem, works wonders. It magnetizes you for more goodness, and (at least for me) it sums up how it feels to trust God, to look Him straight in the eyes and willingly be held by His absolute goodness.

I heard a gorgeous interview that I will share in better ways soon, but for today, within the conversation the speaker shared a meditation:

“You are loved, you are held, you are guided, and you are never alone.”

Thank you for that assurance!

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

family thanksgiving 2021

Our family just polished off a luscious, eventful, soul-satisfying Thanksgiving week. We filled not just one day but one glorious week with fun and love.

Dunaway family Thanksgiving, 2021

We shared meals and indulged in local outings. We played games and told stories. We swapped jokes, cooked, cleaned, cooked and cleaned again, and “helped” Dad with crossword puzzles. We played with all the many family dogs and teased Gen mercilessly for not wanting to play any dogs. “He’s breathing on me! He’s breathing on me!” (She’s smart, but also weird, so we don’t let this go.)

Ang caught lots of teasing for, well, one unforgettable recipe typo which will go down in family legend. (She’s weird, but also smart, so this mistake was delightful.)

We drew names for Christmas gifting, dove into an early round of the Saran Wrap game since we won’t all be together in December, big thanks to Ang for spontaneously gathering those supplies late the evening before our big feast. And we compared notes on how we will spend the coming winter months.

Thanks to Ang, we played the Saran Wrap game early this year!
He wastes nothing, especially if it can be fashioned into something majestic.

Gen, in town from Los Angeles for the first time since the winter holidays of 2019, ran six miles with me at the lake, and we were amazed by our ability to keep up a truly lively conversation while maintaining a pretty smooth pace.

Smiling’s our favorite!! (Me with Gen)

Philip made a decadent chocolate-peanutbutter cheesecake from scratch, and his patience was tested by his older sisters’ chaotic, well, everything. Kenzie taught us a Tik-Tok dance, we might soon be famous. There was a chopsticks prank, and there were tiny chalkboard easels for displaying our thankfulness.

Hundreds of unforgettable moments filled the hours, and several long strands of warm, binding affection encircled the days. We all needed this Thanksgiving Week, probably more than we realized. If last year we held our breath and muddled through, clinging to the bones of tradition, then this year we enjoyed the greatest exhale and then laughed until we felt it in every cell. We luxuriated in the best Thanksgiving has to offer.

The glory of a well executed family holiday is not any one person’s doing, but rather the result of every member’s best effort. Cooking, arranging, engineering games, tending to traditions and details, spearheading city events, amassing extra furniture, telling the best stories, laughing uncontrollably, dancing, listening, leading, following. Being the best looking and also the firstborn (brushes off shoulder).

Every ingredient matters. We rely on each person bring his or her A Game, then we all enjoy the alchemy of our vivid personalities blending into something greater then just the sum of our parts. To me this illustrates part of the magic of family. God gave us this beautiful lifelong gift. By design, it seems, we live more fully as a group when each person steps fully into his or her gifts.

Our parents make everything better,
and they work so hard to keep everyone connected.
The older I get, the more I am amazed by what an accomplishment this is.

That said, at the end of the day, we owe an extra debt to Mom and Dad. Their forty-eight years of pressing traditions into their kids’ hearts has yielded an insatiable appetite for more of everything. Why else would we be drawn so irresistibly to home base, to the same foods, the same seasonal activities, the same faces? I love it all. I am so thankful for this nourishing rhythm. So thankful for my small, young family of origin that has grown and matured into my very favorite group of adults and new children.

Of course we missed Joe (my middle brother) and Halee and their two handsome boys, who are living their U.S. Navy chapter in Spain, but they are happy and thriving. We enjoyed some Facetime screams and giggles with them as we feasted. They happened to be in Barcelona that day!

And we missed Dante (our first nephew) and his bride Deaven, who travelled to spend thanksgiving with her family in California. We had some Facetime laughs with Dante, too, and made sure he knew he was missing the most fun here with us.

Always, for so many holiday seasons over the years, we missed Jocelyn. We are hurting for her and for Jessica, as grief is complex and has a way of intensifying around holidays. Yet even in this, I can give thanks, because the dense, soft warmth of family absorbs so much pain. The safe, circular walls of family keep the worst of the world’s darkness at bay. We can help the girls when they let us, and we always pray and stay ready when they retreat tp privacy.

Can you even imagine the party we are going to have when every single family member is here with us?

This weekend, Gen is back in Los Angeles. Each of our local households has retreated for a bit of rest and maybe holiday cleanup, Christmas gift shopping, and decorating. We’re enjoying a few quiet autumn days before December gains its own glittering momentum.

When I say my heart is full, I mean I feel both short of breath from it all and deeply slowed and rested. Like the simplest things are all we need.

And how wonderful that such a magical week can land me right back on the threshold of my amazing normal life.

Thank you for stopping here. And thank you to everyone who left such loving notes on recent posts. I hope your Thanksgiving was everything you needed it to be, and if not, I hope you know how to step into the next chapter wisely and lovingly. As we begin to observe some Advent weeks, please consider checking in here for some inspiration. I have some good things brewing!

“Thanksgiving was never meant
to be shut up in a single day.”
~Robert Caspar Lintner
XOXOXO