Lazy W Marie

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

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a butterfly on Christmas morning

On Christmas morning, we stood outside in tee shirts and bare feet, marveling at the unseasonably warm weather. Sun shone abundantly, and a vivid blue and black butterfly landed on the northeast corner of our house, warming itself on the brick.

We had just enjoyed a sweet and festive overnight celebration with Jess and Alex, truly a glittery and affectionate family Christmas. This had followed a long and scary week with my Mom in the hospital, then a few days of intense last minute prep for the holiday. I was feeling both deeply satisfied and profoundly tired. Handsome was starting his week long vacation, and we were excited to collapse a little bit into some uneventful days, just resting and cocooning together.

The next day when our world threatened to fall apart, I thought of that butterfly. It had appeared almost exactly twenty four hours earlier, but it felt like a month ago. The butterfly appeared then in that reality, but that world no longer felt like ours.

((colorful greenhouse in January))

The thing is, I am a sucker for a metaphor. My mind searches constantly for parallels and omens, messages and patterns in daily life. Hidden meanings. Usually this serves me pretty well, but for the past eight days or so, my thoughts have been so turbulent and my heart so hurt, I can’t quite get a clear picture.

This week I have typed out and deleted dozens of pages trying to explain what happened, how it affects us and why this feels like history repeating itself in new brutal ways, what sense I have managed to make of it all, and more. But none of it feels worth sharing. I just want to anchor my thoughts to the deep knowlede that God is in control. Remember that our peace is linked directly to how deeply and consistently we stay aligned with Him.

I try to remember the butterfly appearing out of context. Beauty where it doesn’t belong, you know?

I try to remember that Love does win, and this includes the private spaces of my own heart. I cannot afford to hate people, not even temporarily to soothe myself, ha. (Why does hate feel just a little bit good, for just a minute?)

I try to remember that truth has a way of coming to light. Sunshine sanitizes. And often the truth comes out with no help from us.

I try to remember the personal immense value of doing regular, daily work. Simple stuff. Meaningful, steady, physical work. As unto God, not for anyone’s approval.

I try to remember the importance of harnessing my imagination, which is really tough when your body is filled alternately with either rage, fear, or grief. But it does matter. Imagination is powerful.

I try to remember that miracles are happening all around us. And stepping out of our own storm to be aware of other people’s realities can be really helpful. My grandmother was so good at this.

I try to see the hidden answers, the gifts secreted to us in the midst of what we could curse as only a bad thing in life. We have endured far worse than this in our marriage, and we will endure this.

Thanks for listening, friends. Thanks for overlooking my lack of clarity and my failure to arrive at a great metaphor. Maybe the butterfly on Christmas Day was an omen of good and beautiful things out of the bue, maybe not. But it will probably live in my memory as an attachment to this bizarre chapter.

Order, Disorder, Reorder
~Dr. Richard Rohr
xoxo

safe to celebrate

A couple of weeks ago while festooning the farm with paper chains and garland and lights, paper snowflakes and more, I texted Handsome asking if he had decided to add a Christmas tree or any other fun decorations to his office at the Commish. “You’re safe to celebrate now,” I typed. But instantly I realized it was an assurance to myself as much as it was for him.

We’re safe, friends.

Safe to celebrate. Safe to sink into the lush beauty and immense pleasure of not only Christmastime but life in general, in all seasons. Safe, despite the worries that gnaw at us, despite the still unresolved heartaches. Safe to celebrate, even as the work is neverending and some precious loved ones are living in terror and suspense. Safe even as we worry about aging animals and parents and the world at large, changing constantly.

Safe.

Safe because we have faced so many crises in twenty five years and remained standing, closer and closer together. Safe because we have navigated a dozen difficult conversation just these past few months and emerged from the fog with clearer vision and even firmer footing. Safe because, after wobbling around in the dark for a while, I remember again where my power lies and know in my bones how strong the flow of Love really is, how immediately available it always is, always has been. It’s a short pivot, really, not a long journey home.

((mistletoe kisses in Guthrie, OK, December 2025))

We’re safe to celebrate because the miraculous gift of Christmas was freely given even with the unavoidable agony that would happen so shortly afterwards. I think that’s what reminds me most of the importance of letting these realities of life coexist: God teaches us constantly that grief will always follow joy, and joy will always follow grief; and we are invited and instructed to embrace both experiences, and everthing in between.

I hope you feel this invitation to celebrate, friends. I hope you feel safe to dive deep and keep your eyes open to everything, every aspect of life, knowing you are surrounded and supported by Love. Designed by Love Itself to be a conduit for the same. You are safe, so let’s celebrate.

“So to live as if you are unloved is a limitation.
Living unloved is like clipping a bird’s wings and removing its ability to fly.”
~William Young
XOXOXO

to Judy at her baby’s milestone birthday

August 26, 2025

Dear Judy,

Fifty years ago you were likely preparing for the hospital, anxiously awaiting your much loved and much planned love child with Harvey. Actually, knowing your nature, you had been ready for a while! Your suitcase was probably already packed, and you had long since made plans for the older kids to be at Grandma Goldie’s house. I wonder if you had Mexican food one more time before going into labor. Did you know you were having a son, or was that a surprise? I don’t know if I ever heard that detail.

What I do know without a shadow of a doubt is that you loved being his Mom. I think possibly, of all the passions God gave you in this earthly life, you loved nothing more. And he has flourished because of it. He flourishes still, drawing constantly on your love, your belief in him, your character shaping, and the hope that your prayers “hang in the air around him,” as the saying goes.

We would love to be partying with you this year. This milestone. This week to celebrate so much, not just the passage of a truly stunning volume of time but also the achievement of deep and hard earned peace. You might not agree with every single choice he has made in recent years, particularly this tattoo that’s about to happen, but most of those would just earn some smirks and jokes and a prized onery look of mock judgement over your eyeglasses, after which you would probably smile again and ask him, “Well, have you ate?” And even if he had eaten, he would say no and choose between a few favorite restaurants.

You would be proud, though, deeply proud, of so much. I hope you can see the best highlights from wherever you are, because he is carrying the mantle for you in ways we could not have dreamed of before you left. You should see what he has accomplished at the Commission. The storms he has navigated, the spiritual infrastructure he has built. Not aligned with any political party, but aligned with doing the right thing, he frequently invokes stories about you and your party-indifferent love for people and getting things done efficiently and transparently. He is the manager you always declared he would be, just on a much larger scale. We still have that concrete planter you gifted him to celebrate his first bank branch manager job on May Avenue in Oklahoma City. Every time I see it I think of you and how firmly you saw his future, decades ahead of time. People commonly talk about a mother’s love, and that’s good and true; but you also demonstrated the power of a mother’s vision. Thank you for that. Thank you for holding it for him, and thank you for showing both of us how vital it is to see through the storm into a beautiful future, an unclouded day.

He is an excellent father in law, as you were an excellent mother in law. His instincts and affection are so genuine and tender, it makes me fall more deeply in love with him every time I watch him with Alex. And if the kids’ wishes come true, he will be an excellent Grandpa, too. He’ll spoil those babies rotten and never apologize for it. We already have so much energy built up here at the farm for future grandbabies, and I know you would be happy to watch it all unfold, so long as we don’t let them have three wheelers.

Sometimes he laughs in a way that makes it feel like you are in the room with us. Sometimes he looks at me over his glasses in the exact way you would. And did you know we have a dear friend now, named Cathy, who has about a hundred uncanny traits similar to yours? When we finally acknowledged it to each other, it was such a comfort. I think her likenesses to you draw him in for weekend touchpoints. A sacred rhythm.

He is still finding ways to “Take care of the children,” as you implored him to do. The opportunities and inspirations change seasonally, but it’s always a natural fit when it happens. I wish you could share in some of it. The Batmobile in particular is a project I wish you could touch and hear and experience, bodily. There is no doubt you are woven into it.

He still loves your chocolate fudge cake and lemon ice box pie more than any other holiday dessert. He still has the same, soft old Snoopy you gave him. He still holds every good thing about childhood up to the high standard you provided. He still tells all his stories to anyone who will listen. You are here with us, is what I’m saying. We miss you terribly, but you are still here. You are very much alive in his personality, and I hope you feel it.

Thank you for loving him so well for the thirty eight years he had you that he still feels it. Thank you for raising a boy who could become the man that he is, the kind of man this world desperately needs. Disciplined, in control of himself, ambitious, protective, fiercely loyal, fun loving, and God fearing. Thank you for managing to establish so many traditions and cravings in him that endure to this day. Our life is so rich because of that. Your vacation-loving, Batman-crazed, video game-playing baby boy is all of that still and much more.

Fifty years old this week, more handsome than ever, and healthier than ever, too. Your son is doing great. Your motherhood continues. I just wanted you to know.

We love you, we miss you,
and we wish you could be here for his birthday.
xoxo
Marie

space to feel my feelings about Joc

My energy has been stalled for a few hours. I thought surely it was just from this spell of cold, dark weather. Or maybe from having a list of important but not very challenging tasks to finish today. Or maybe it’s the ambiguity of not being on a training plan right now. Some days I embrace my freedom and really squeeze a lot out of it. Other days, when I am low on motivation, the great openness is unnerving. I feel unmoored. Whether with fitness goals or caring for the farm or writing or anything, too much blank space can, well, stall me out. I guess I need to reestablish some structure, I think to myself, fill the calendar back up. Train for another marathon.

Then I noticed two prevailing trains of thought, both about Jocelyn.

One has surfaced almost every time lately when I get on the floor to cuddle Klaus, nearly every time we play outside: I am keenly aware that Jocelyn’s dog, Bridget, was a puppy when Klaus was a puppy. They were well acquainted then and even sometimes “corresponded” through the mail, when she and Joc first lived in Colorado. I see Klaus’ silver whiskers and ample belly, hear his gentlemanly groans and notice how his energy is so different now than it was nine years ago, and I cannot help but wonder what Bridget looks like now, how her energy is, what middle age looks like on such a strong and adventurous little woman. These are bittersweet imaginations, and I think maybe I can tilt that scale away from bitter, to mostly sweet. Maybe I can willfully conjure up how the reunion will soon look and feel. Bridget running in the grass towards us, no doubt carrying a rock for someone to throw. Retrieving rocks was once her favorite thing next to chasing bears off their cabin porch and stampeding behind deer up the mountain.

The second prevailing thought is much darker. I have been trying to silence a voice in my head that says, “She’s just not coming home. It’s been too long.” And I have no idea what to do with this, because it won’t stop. Hourly, at odd intervals, it just echoes. The actual words, typed out and spoken silenty in my head, are cruel enough. I don’t have to hear them to recoil. It makes me physically nauseated.

When people ask me if I have heard from her, the truth is awful. I have not. I sometimes hear updates about her, not from her. But I do appreciate hearing her name spoken. When noone asks, that hurts too. But I kind of understand why they don’t want to bring it up. When I see photos of her on my phone or her artwork around the farm, or even when I care for the horses she once loved so much, my god. Everything hurts so much. Sometimes it all serves to keep her “with us,” but right now it is terrifying. And complaining about this pain when so many people have lost their children forever, in undeniable and truly hopeless ways, feels so self indulgent and ridculous.

I still do have hope. Right?

Maybe these are just the emotions I have successfully avoided in all the previous months and years of being extremely busy and overcommitted. I probably was staying busy to not have to feel it all. Maybe this short season of loose schedules and low commitments have simply given my heart some space to unfold. Maybe this is what I have been feeling for a really long time, in other words, and none of it is a signal to any new and terrible thing happening. It’s not a prophetic warning, which is something else I fear; it’s just an emotional landscape finally visible because I have cleared some distractions. Is this a true psychological phenomenon, or have I invented it to make myself feel better? Does anyone know?

I tell myself again that this is just a season. A test. That one day we will be celebrating again, just as we have so many times already! And in that bright future, I will be ashamed to look back at any point before when I had given up hope (which is impossible to do with your children, actually) or indulged in sadness. So today, I’ll finish some work worth doing and get some exercise. I’ll bend some deliberate thought toward good things coming soon. And, because this feels like an instructive moment, I’ll be honest with myself about how I’m really doing: Not great. This is hard.

I love you so much, Joc. Nothing can change that.
I dream of you almost every night, and I talk to you all day, every day,
so much so, that I often trick myself into thinking you’re just across town
and could surprise me at the front door any minute.
I hope you are happy and being loved fully.
I hope you know that we are still here,
still loving and missing you.
XOXO

an unexpected source of Christmas magic

This past weekend our family lost our very special Aunt Marion. My sweet Mom lost her big sister. Everyone lost a truly unique and delicious life force.

We had been saying goodbye slowly and in ever more difficult ways for several months, but this final goodbye is hitting me harder than I expected it to. I knew it was coming, but I had not yet allowed myself to feel it. Our friend Trey shared this with me, and it’s perfect:

“We cannot think our way out of grief. We must feel our way out of grief.” ~Angie Corbett-Kuiper

On the surface, a death in the family at Christmastime seems incredibly morbid. Incongruent. And surely at some moments it has felt that way. But this slow, hard, gentle, unrelenting process, this steady spiral toward Aunt Marion’s passing, has produced some light, too. And isn’t Christmas all about light? Much of it has been miraculous for her and miraculous for all of us touched by her life and death.

Speaking just for myself now, it all has softened my heart in ways I was not ready to even admit I was hardened. It actually does feel like a transformation, and for this I am so thankful. Imagine Scrooge on that first Christmas morning when he felt loosed and wild with Love.

There is other Christmas magic here. We have been tasting it over and over again, in unexpected ways, when we allow ourselves to.

Christmas magic in Cathy’s joy to see her blown plastic Nativity set arranged for the first time, complete with a little wooden stable Rex built for her. A childhood dream come true. All women are little girls, all men are little boys, and we all still have access to that exact joy from childhood. Let’s help each other tap into it more often.

Christmas magic to see three granddaughters surround their Grandma in her grief, taking her to breakfast, sitting with her in the hospital, cuddling, helping with Hospice doctor conversations. Tending, loving gently, and just learning by feel the ways of being a family in these moments. How else do we learn it except by being part of it?

Christmas magic just walking around Chickasha, drenched in sparkling lights and the fragrance of hot cocoa and the patchwork of funny sweaters, hearing everyone’s favorite carols and hymns.

Christmas magic in quick and easy phone calls between our siblings group, just navigating the details, trying to be more useful than cumbersome to Mom and Dad.

Undeniable magic and poetry in six months of sobriety on the day of her passing, and all the connectedness in that story. We see magic in reconnecting with distnat family, too.

Christmas magic in Harrah’s small town parade, saying “Merry Christmas!!” to a few hundred strangers and neighbors, seeing all the kids excited for candy and the Batmobile and garland and inflatable reindeer. Surprising the adults with candy, too! So many warm smiles and hugs. So much genuine human warmth. Just the act of wishing someone, eye to eye, a Merry Christmas felt incredible. We were casting spells.

Our dear friend Mer has been playing Mrs. Claus at a weekend event in Oklaoma City. She shared that even the adults need some Christmas magic, and it has filled her heart to help provide it. I fully agree. The old adage is true, about lighting candles: You cannot spread a flame and lose your own. It just spreads.

So now, this week, all full up on this abundant Christmas magic, we are flowing mindfully between a variety of preparations. Preparing for Aunt Marion’s funeral service, then preparing for the holiday. And back again. Preparing in whatever ways we can imagine to just be available for Mom and Dad, staying engaged with traditions, staying engaged with our work and with each other. Finding gifts that will thrill our loved ones, then absorbing an old memory of some beautiful thing Aunt Marion did for one of us, sharing the ache that she won’t ever get to do that again.

We wrap presents not just in paper but in memory, each one a symbol of love, of recognition, of trying our best to show someone how much they matter. And sometimes, it’s the most whimsical gifts that speak the loudest—ones that carry a spark of joy and lightness, even in heavy moments. In that spirit, soufeel bobbleheads offer a playful, customized way to honor the people we love, whether it’s a goofy caricature of a sibling or a tribute that makes someone smile through tears.

These little figures become more than just decorations—they’re reminders of connection, of the humor and heart that bind us all together, especially when we need it most. We bake and make lists and read the Gospel of Luke, then we reflect on the choices that stole our family member and reflect even longer on her great beauty and all her many jaw dropping accomplishments.

Gifts don’t have to be elaborate to carry meaning; sometimes it’s the smaller, everyday tokens that resonate most because they weave themselves seamlessly into daily life. Practical yet personal items can become gentle reminders of love, offering comfort in moments when words fall short. That’s why something as simple as customized keychains in bulk can carry such significance—they serve as both functional keepsakes and symbols of connection, ensuring that each recipient holds onto a piece of thoughtfulness that travels with them everywhere.

In a season when absence is felt so keenly, these little gifts remind us that love still moves with us, tucked into pockets, held in hands, and carried quietly through the years.

In between? There are lights and there is music. And C.S. Lewis and cinnamon. Between the preparations, which all are just Love in action, is space and breath for magic.

Everywhere we look we see new expressions of Christmas magic, new life even in this time of death and grief. That is the miracle. I hope you can experience it, too.

We love you, Aunt Marion.
XOXO