Winter Weather and Sunday Drives

The wind howls outside, and it is forecast to keep howling.  I've been awake for hours, working on my sermon and looking at maps and radar and weather forecasts, trying to figure out if it's safe to make our way across the mountain.  It's been snowing in Bristol, where we're headed, but the forecast calls for no accumulation.  We will make the attempt to get to Faith Lutheran in Bristol, where I preach and preside every Sunday. 

As always, I send the sermon manuscript ahead of us--that way, if something happens, much of worship can still continue.

There are drawbacks and limitations to this Synod Appointed Minister position--for both me and for the congregation.  I can't do much quality pastoral care from a distance.  The weather can make it impossible for me to do the main work, the preaching and presiding (and leading Confirmation class) on Sunday mornings--and wintry weather is the culprit, not summer weather.

I know that people who live much further north, say in Minneapolis, would laugh at my weather concerns.  A bit of wind, a bit of snow--what is the big deal?  But we are still essentially in the U.S. South, where we don't get much wintry weather.

Let me bring this brief blog post to a close and start strategizing a warm outfit for the drive.

The Feast Day of Santa Lucia

Today is the feast day of Santa Lucia, a woman in 4th century Rome during a time of horrible persecution of Christians and much of the rest of the population, and she was martyred.  The reasons for her martyrdom vary:   Did she really gouge out her eyes because a suitor commented on their beauty? Did she die because she had promised her virginity to Christ? Was she killed because the evil emperor had ordered her to be taken to a brothel because she was giving away the family wealth? Was she killed because a rejected suitor outed her for being a Christian?  We don’t really know.  

She is most often pictured with a crown of candles on her head, and tradition says that she wore a candle crown into the catacombs when she took provisions to the Christians hiding there.  With a candle crown, she freed up a hand to carry more supplies.  I love this idea, but it wouldn't surprise me to find out that it isn't true.

Truth often doesn't matter with these popular saints like Lucia, Nicholas, and Valentine.  We love the traditions, and that means we often know more about the traditions than we do about the saints behind them, if we know anything at all about the saints behind these popular days.

This feast day still seems relevant for two reasons.  First, Lucia shows us the struggle that women face in daily existence in a patriarchal culture, the culture that most of us still must endure.  It’s worth remembering that many women in many countries today don’t have any more control over their bodies or their destinies than these long-ago virgin saints did. In this time of Advent waiting, we can remember that God chose to come to a virgin mother who lived in a culture that wasn’t much different than Santa Lucia’s culture: highly stratified, with power concentrated at the top, power in the hands of white men, which made life exceeding different for everyone who wasn't a powerful, wealthy, white man. It's a society that sounds familiar, doesn't it?

On this feast day of Santa Lucia, we can spend some time thinking about women, about repression, about what it means to control our destiny.  We can think about how to spread freedom.

It's also an important feast day because of the time of year when we celebrate.  Even though we're still in the season of late autumn, in terms of how much sunlight we get, those of us in the northern hemisphere are in the darkest time of the year.  It's great to have a festival that celebrates the comforts of this time of year:  candles and baked goods and hot beverages.

I love our various festivals to get us through the dark of winter. In these colder, darker days, I wish that the early church fathers had put Christmas further into winter, so that we can have more weeks of twinkly lights and candles to enjoy. Christmas in February makes more sense to me, even though I understand how Christmas ended up near the Winter Solstice.

I made my traditional Santa Lucia bread last week, for a gathering where I wanted one slightly healthier treat to be available.  Today, I'm baking a different bread, but you could make a more traditional offering.  If you’d like to try, this blog post will guide you through it.  You could end with bread braids cooling on racks in just a few hours:

If you’re the type who needs pictures, it’s got a link to a blog post with pictures.  Enjoy.

Happy Santa Lucia day! Have some special bread, drink a bracing hot beverage, and light the candles against the darkness.

Teaching Insights from a Great Semester

Before I get too far away from Fall semester, I want to record some teaching insights that I want to remember.  I've just gotten teaching evaluations and I spent last week reading final exams, which have students reflect on the semester, so I want to be sure to remember some of those insights, along with my own.

--I've been intrigued by how many students enjoyed peer editing.  If I was a student, peer editing would be one of my least favorite things because I hate group work, and I wouldn't be getting much feedback that was useful.  But students who did comment on peer editing talked about how much they enjoyed seeing what other students were writing about, and some of them talked about how peer editing helped them get to know their fellow students.  Duly noted--I'll continue peer editing and experiment with peer editing in my 102 classes.

--I had far fewer students complain about my no cell phones policy.  A few said they appreciated having a time when they were less plugged in.  I am much more committed to my no cell phones policy than I was 2 years ago.  I've gone even further in that I rarely allow students to use laptops or tablets.  Students have plenty of time to use their devices.  In my classes, I want them to use their brains and their hands to record notes.

--Many students liked my adopt-a-tree assignment, which I used in both English 100 and 101 classes.  They may have been telling me what they thought I wanted to hear, but their assessments seemed genuine.  They talked about being mystified at first, or even angry about how the tree assignments have nothing to do with college--but then they talked about the skills that they honed (description, writing directions, deep observation), and a few talked about how those skills were useful beyond the assignment.

--I put creative writing assignments in every class, regardless of whether or not it's a creative writing class.  The students who commented on these assignments talked about how much they liked them both for the sake of creativity and for doing something different and for inspiring them to think about writing differently.  Again, they may have been telling me what they thought I wanted to hear, but for the most part, I don't think so.

--I am surprised by how many students I have had this term who want to be writers--not content creators, not influencers, not TikTok stars, but writers like the ones we've studied.  You might say, "Sure, of course, you teach creative writing."  But the creative writing students were just a small number of the total students who talked about wanting to be stronger writers, not just to be better writers so that they could get better grades.  Many of them wanted to continue their creative writing.

--One of my creative writing students wrote about how I had reignited her interest in being an English teacher.  She wrote passionately about her desire to teach in middle school or high school.  I felt happy about that, about being an inspiration as a teacher, not just as a writer.

--I want to remember that I occasionally would leave a class thinking that it had been a failure (especially with peer editing, which never goes as smoothly as I'd like) only to find out that students had a very different experience.

--I have become even more committed to having a daily writing grade, most of it done by hand.  It's a practical way to end the class, and it lets me know what students are learning.  I've created larger projects that have them revise the daily writings.  It helps us talk about AI, about how it might be useful and how it's not.  It ensures that students are doing at least some writing on their own.

I feel very lucky to have had such a great semester with so many students who seemed so open minded and happy to be in class together.  I feel fortunate beyond words to be at a small, liberal arts college with increasing enrollment.  May this good fortune continue!

Returning to Bethlehem Again

I spent much of yesterday doing volunteer work, but not the traditional kind.  I haven't been stocking the food pantry or knitting scarves.  Yesterday I went over to a local Methodist church that allows its gym to be transformed into ancient Bethlehem for a walk-through, immersive experience, Return to Bethlehem.  All proceeds go to Asheville Buncombe Community Christian Ministry (ABCCM), an interfaith group which works on hunger and homelessness issues in Buncombe county, the county which contains Asheville.

I first started doing this volunteer work in December of 2023, and I wrote a blog post about it, which I'll quote here:   "I thought it might be something like a living Nativity scene, maybe with a few extra scenes. I was wrong. It's a whole living Nativity village. One of the supervisors walked me through the space, telling me about how the visitors would stop at each station to hear actors tell about the space. For example, there's a weaver's house, and the Temple, and a place where a person dyes cloth. Eventually the tour ends up at the inn and the stable outside of the inn."

It takes a lot of work to make this transformation:  lots of hanging and draping of fabric, LOTS of industrial stapling, lots of arranging of baskets and chairs and potted plants and such.  I love doing it, and I'm happy to help.  It hits a weird combination of my interests:  the illusions of stagecraft, theatre, fabric, color and texture--creating illusions and believability.

Here's a 2023 picture, when the theatre flats were first being assembled.

Eventually each station gets its own furniture and tubs of supplies.  We have other tubs of fabric we can use, all sorts of fabrics.

And then, finally, a finished product, in this case, the Temple (this is a 2023 picture--I forgot to take pictures of  yesterday's creation, where I used more blue fabrics and velvets).

It's more standing on a ladder than I'd like, but I'm happy I can still do it.  I expected to be much more sore this morning than I am.

After a morning working on the Return to Bethlehem sets, I went over to the local Lutheran church to work on Lutheran World Relief quilts.  We assembled 4 quilts to get them ready for knotting.  I prefer to assemble quilt tops out of all the fabric we have, but by assembling those quilts, one of our members could take them home to get the knotting done.  I did bring some fabric home in the hopes that I/we can assemble a quilt top or two in the next week.  And then I made some repairs to a quilt top that my spouse had been assembling before he got frustrated and made ill-advised cuts.

Today I'll go back to the Methodist church--we're racing against the clock, since Return to Bethlehem opens at 6 tonight.  When I left yesterday at 1, we had made good progress, and more volunteers were expected.  Many of us have some experience now, which makes it easier to get things done.  And we seem to have enough ladders and enough staplers, lacks which have slowed us down in the past.

And now it is time to shift my morning into a different gear, to get ready for another day of volunteering in this way.

Publication Ponderings in Mid-December

I woke up this morning thinking about publication opportunities as the year draws to a close.  There are book contests that seem interesting still, like the Wilder Prize at Two Sylvias Press.  At one point in the last few months (see this blog post), I thought about revising the last manuscript of poems that I created in 2019.  I even printed the table of contents to see which poems have been published since I last sent out the manuscript, and I made a list of new poems to include.  I put question marks by the poems I might take out to make room for the new.  I thought I would change the title and have the manuscript ready by mid-December, so I could send it to a few contests.

But this morning, I have a different vision.  I'm going to wait until summer to do a deeper dive into manuscript assembly.  I'm going to create a new manuscript called Higher Ground.  The title works on several levels with the climate change poems along with spirituality poems.  I'm going to let the idea percolate as I send out poems for publication and think about the larger themes of my body of poems.  I think it will be a much stronger manuscript if I take this different approach of creating something new, not grafting onto the old.

I am aware that I may only have a chance to publish one book with a spine when it comes to poetry, given my age and how long it takes to move a poetry book manuscript from submission to publication.  So I want it to be good work on several levels:  the best poetry that I have written, the poems that work as a cohesive whole in the best way.

This morning I decided to submit some individual poems to journals whose submission windows close soon.  As I do this, I update my submission log, which I don't always do when the rejections come in, which means I miss a few.  Today, along with a rejection, a request to submit during the narrow window in December when the journal is open for submissions.

Happily, I hadn't missed the opportunity, so I submitted right away, before I lost momentum.

And now it's off for a very full day of volunteer work.  I'm going to help the group that builds the set for "Return to Bethlehem," zip over for quilt group from 1:30 -3:30 or so, and then back to the Bethlehem set.

Noah's Wife Reads the Realtor.com Listings

It's a climate change/catastrophe winter break, in terms of my reading.  I zoomed through Ian McEwin's What We Can Know--in some ways, it's a literary mystery, but it's set in the future, after various climate catastrophes have changed the coming 100 years.  Yesterday, I started Joe Mungo Reed's Terrestrial History, which also travels back and forth in future years.  Both books are compelling in so many ways, and I'm so happy to find myself consumed by real reading again, not just doomscrolling.

Of course, the doomscrolling habits are hard to quit.

Those of you who know me, either in person or through this blog, know that climate change/catastrophe is never far from my brain.  This morning I read this article about German scientists sound the alarm about the apparent speeding up of warming--we might be to 3 degrees of increased temperature by 2050, not by the end of the century.

You might say, "Wait, I thought we had agreements that would allow us to avoid these outcomes."  Well, yes, if we actually did what we all had agreed to do.  And frankly, even with those agreements, followed to the letter, we'd have been cutting it close.

This morning, I found myself entering our South Florida zip code into Realtor.com, and scrolling through.  I'm always on the lookout for our old house to reappear.  This morning, it wasn't that house, but two houses across the street from our old house.  Hmm.  

And then I searched for the house itself, which is listed as a place we could rent for just $5,295 a month.  Are there really renters who can afford such a rent?  It's an apartment.com listing, so not a short term rental site from what I can tell.

Perhaps there are not renters who can/want to afford this rent.  It's been vacant since August--and probably before that.  It's been off and on the market since we sold it, and I don't think anyone has stayed there much.  It was listed as a short-term rental, then for sale, and now as a longer term rental.  I scrolled through the pictures and felt a bit of sadness at all the updates that we did that have been ripped out or covered over.  I have fallen into this pit of despair before, and always, there is this voice in my head saying, "Honestly, Kristin, you were lucky to escape with most of your possessions and a profit on the house sale."

And along with that voice of reason this morning, my muse chimed in, with her gentle reminder that I am writing a series of poems in the voice of Noah's wife (yes, the Biblical Noah who built an ark).  I am still working on it, but I am pleased with this vision of Noah's wife consulting the realtor sites and wondering if they made a mistake even as she is sure that they are safer now.

What a lovely way to salvage the spiral that the Realtor.com site often inspires!

Week-End Update: Cooking and Other Types of Mood Management

In some ways, it was a good week-end.  Sunday at Faith Lutheran in Bristol, Tennessee went well, the kind of Sunday where I find myself wishing this position as a Synod Appointed Minister could continue for several more years.  It might, but much of that decision will not be up to me.

It was the kind of week-end where I hear about the travel plans of neighbors and feel a weird sense of emotion.  It's not envy, exactly.  They're taking a 10 day walk across England, 7-8 miles a day, carrying everything they need on their backs, following the same path that the pilgrim's in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales traveled.  They are at least 10 years older than I am, maybe 15.  It's the kind of plan that makes me wonder if I should retire/work less now rather than later.  But I am not sure we could make this kind of trek now.  For one thing, the long airline flight to get there is a dealbreaker for me.  And my spouse would need a very flat route, and he would need to do some training to be ready for even a flat route.

So, not envy, but the kind of feeling I have had so often in my life, wondering what is wrong with me that I don't want what so many other people seem to want.  In the above paragraph, it's vacation plans and bucket lists.  I look at the larger culture, particularly the desire to have the latest cell phone and hours to spend scrolling, and I don't feel like something is wrong with me.  I do worry about the health of the larger culture, particularly when I stumble across particularly disturbing information about what tech is doing to our brains.

I organized a cookie tasting for our neighborhood group, and I tried to make a recipe, pecan sandies, from childhood.  As with the chocolate chip cookies I've tried to make, the butter seemed to melt outside the cookie and fry it.  Not untasty, but not the memory of the cookie.  And there was that distressing moment when I said, "I can't cook anymore."  A ridiculous thought, but a distressing one.

Yesterday, though, we had great success making pizza with cast iron pans.  Before putting them in the oven, I turned the burner to medium heat for 3 minutes, as recommended by this blog post from King Arthur Baking Company.  It was the first time since being in this house when we've had a good homemade pizza.  My usual experience is to go through all the effort to make homemade pizza, only to be left with a mess of a kitchen and a blah pizza and a yearning for pizza from somewhere else. 

Yesterday as we ate pizza, we watched the recording of the Sunday worship service at the National Cathedral.  The service was beautiful, and once again, I found myself observing a strange mood evolving in me.  There was some nostalgia for the year I spent in seminary, where I went to the Cathedral occasionally.  I felt nostalgia and wistfulness and sadness for a time that is gone and won't be coming back.  I felt fortunate to have had the experiences and the opportunities and at the same time, I know what I had planned to do with that time in the city and the ways I fell short.  I tried to keep focused on what I did manage to do.  

When the worship service was over, we switched to Saturday Night Live snippets, so it was easier to manage my mood.  And then it was off to bed; I've been going to sleep increasingly earlier, and I feel like I need to get back on a more reasonable track.