Here, for your laughter and enjoyment, is my Completely Unreasonable Summer Reading List. I really do want to read all these books, not necessarily in this order. Preferably soon.

• Crime and Punishment (Dostoyevsky) (the second half)
• The Iliad (Homer)
• The Making of a Poem (Mark Strand, Eavan Boland)
• Cilla Lee-Jenkins: Future Author Extraordinaire (Susan Tan)
• When You Trap a Tiger (Tae Keller)
• This Our Exile (Joshua Hren)
• Freeing Jesus (Diana Butler Bass)
• Monet’s Palate Cookbook (Aileen Bordman and Derek Fell)
• The Five Wounds (Kirstin Valdez Quade)
• Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale (Adam Minter)
• One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel García Márquez)
• Unsheltered (Barbara Kingsolver)
• The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty (Sebastian Barry)
• Lost in Thought (Zena Hitz)
• The Westing Game (Ellen Raskin)
• Poems New and Collected (Wisława Szymborska)
• Wingfeather Series (Andrew Peterson)
• Plus back issues of Image, Evangelization and Culture, and Plough

It’s possible I need to be less ambitious and more focused. It’s highly unlikely I’ll finish anywhere near all of these by the end of July.

But a girl can dream, can’t she?

We did a silly thing. We went to a violin rehearsal, despite the flash flood warnings, with the thought that if the weather was really that bad, surely it would have been canceled.

Trying to get home, and circling helplessly with all the other soggy cars on the south-west side of Lafayette, I was at a bit of a loss. Kaliste Saloom Road was flooded. Ambassador Caffery was flooded. Broadmoor was flooded. I didn’t dare try Verot School Road. For all the hurricanes and flash floods we’ve lived through down here, I’ve never actually been in a situation where I couldn’t get home because of the water on the road, and it was nearing 8pm, so I wasn’t sure what we should do.

Fortunately, a good friend of ours lives very close to where we were stuck. The kind of friend one can call at eight o’clock at night and ask to drop in. I called her, and we spent an hour and a half on her couch, waiting for the water to go down and drinking lavender chamomile tea.

When it seemed reasonable to try again, we set out, with the assurance that we could come back and sleep on the couches if we still couldn’t get through.

Needless to say, I prayed all the way home.

And we made it – the road already looked like we had just had any normal rain shower, not a near crisis.

So it was late when I went to bed, but I had been slack about my prayer time during the last few days, so I picked up the little devotional I’ve been using (The Reckless Way of Love: Notes on Following Jesus, which is a collection of excerpts from Dorothy Day’s writings) and this was the reading up next:

Pouring rain today. I stayed in, resting – feeling exhausted. Sorrow, grief, exhaust one. Then tonight the prayers, the rosaries I’ve been saying were answered. And the feeling that prayers are indeed answered when we cry out for help was a comfort in itself. I had the assurance that they were answered, though it might not be now.

Dorothy Day, from The Duty of Delight, quoted in The Reckless Way of Love

Well. First of all, “stayed in, resting” sounded like what we should have done.

But we didn’t, and during the course of the evening I’d been getting these little nudges – “only do the necessary shopping so you can be back sooner.” Lucy finished early, and would have waited a half hour in the rain for me if I had done my usual Monday night rounds. “Turn around…” repeatedly. “Just call Danielle, already!”

When I read the next half of the devotional entry, I had no doubt that my guardian angel had been working overtime:

I would not perhaps see the results. “Praised be God, the God of consolation. He comforts us in all our afflictions and enables us to comfort those who are in trouble, with the same consolation we have had from him” (2 Cor. 1:3-4). Suffering draws us to prayer and we are comforted. Or at least strengthened to continue in faith, and hope, and love.

Dorothy Day, from The Duty of Delight, quoted in The Reckless Way of Love

Our friends were the consolation we needed – literally safe harbor in a storm. What could have been an evening sitting in our car in the Books-A-Million parking lot waiting for the rain to stop ended up instead being an evening of comfort and conversation. My panic was soothed: we had a place to sleep if needed. My friends’ superior knowledge of the roads in the area strengthened me to continue.

God knows that, despite his long history of faithfulness to me, sometimes I need a reminder that he will provide for me. This week, it came in the form of good friends and chamomile tea.

The blackberries have come into their own.

We planted a few unassuming cuttings given to us by a friend roughly a year ago, right at the beginning of quarantine, if I remember correctly. Our friend’s gardens are lush with life, so I had high hopes for any gift from her.

We put too many plants in too small a space in a bare corner of the garden, where the weeds had been kept at bay by a layer of crunchy red pumice stone. (I’m still wondering what I’ll do with the box full of stone we took out.) We settled the plants in, and we waited.

The pile of vines grew. (Pile is really the best word for it – a pile with tentacles.) As the weather warmed this spring, cheeky white blossoms started to cover the plants. We started to get excited.

The white petals fell, leaving tiny green clusters. We watched and drooled, and started planning parfaits, pies, cobbler.

Still the brambles grew. Tentacles came up in my daughter’s garden nearby, in the vegetable bed on the other side, in the neighbor’s yard on the other side of the fence. I played yank-a-shoot, whack-a-mole style, in long sleeves and heavy garden gloves.

(Summer project: Operation Contain Blackberry…if such a thing is even possible. I have a feeling we’ll be fighting blackberry shoots and lemon balm for the rest of our lives.)

In the last week or so the berries have started to ripen. Ten, even twenty fat, dark berries a day from our little 3×3 square of land, plus the area the plants took for themselves. We are at the point of growing our own cobbler.

A friend of mine has a theory that blackberry plants are actually carnivorous. One of her sheep was killed (not by blackberries), and where she buried it now grow the fattest, sweetest blackberries she’s ever had on her property. As further evidence she sights the fact that the thorns on the blackberry plant curve inward, back towards the base of the plant, like it wants to hook you and pull you in for its dinner.

Having painstakingly extracted these little delights during the last week, I think I agree. This bramble pile would eat me if given the chance. Which is how life works, of course, but I didn’t realize I was bringing anything quite so menacing into my backyard. 

So we’re keeping two eyes on the toddler these days. And the cats. And the dog. Warning them, Don’t get too close to the blackberry bushes! 

We’re also preheating the oven for the cobbler.

And when we’re not tied up with graduations, recitals, and final exams, we’re researching trellises for next year, in case there is any hope of our taming this (delicious) beast of an urban homesteading experiment.

Here’s a little something for Mother’s Day. This happened in our house this week.

8:27 PM

3 year old to big sister: Hi.

Big sister: You should be in your bed.

3 year old: I not want to be in my bed.

Big sister: Go hug mom.

3 year old: I not want to hug mom. She make me go to my bed.

At least he’s honest, right?

Here’s to all the laughs motherhood brings, and to the dream of undisturbed sleep. Happy Mother’s Day!

It’s that time of year again: May Madness. Finals, graduations, recitals, Mother’s Day, and we have a birthday (7th) and wedding anniversary (16th) in our family to round it all out.

Needless to say, I’m hiding in my bedroom with books of poetry more than usual.

Still, it’s amazing to watch our kids blossom. They’re stepping out of their comfort zones, getting in front of crowds (or cameras) and sharing the gifts God has given them. I’m constantly in awe of the beauty they’re already bringing into the world.

And as much as I cringe at the thought of making small talk (or worse, housecleaning) of course it’s always good to celebrate family and new beginnings. I usually even enjoy it. Especially if there’s cake, which there will be.

But I also look forward to June, and the calm after the storm. Time for lounging and reading, playing board games, going for family walks in the evenings. Basking in the flowers and good things to eat coming from the garden.

It all comes back to the garden again, that little bit of refuge where things are slow and simple. Even in the face of army worms, slugs, and flea beetles, it’s a comfort to see these tiny seeds grow and produce twenty-, or fifty-, or a hundred-fold. Such bounty!

A talk I was listening to this week mentioned the quote, “One plants, another waters, but God gives the increase.” I feel that all the time right now as I watch our kids grow. There is no way I can take credit for their talents, or their kind hearts, or their humor. God is causing the increase in them daily, and it is my privilege and blessing to witness his goodness.