discovering an island

we traveled to an island yesterday, passing miles of colonial homes decorated with pumpkins, large and small. only in massachusetts can this many households afford to decorate for every holiday.

we ate at wendy's. i don't mind their salads, and that spicy chicken sandwich was good, but i still can't bring myself to eat the chili, even though i know that lady stuck the finger in herself.

the island is out past the marshlands that protect us from flooding and over the bridge that has what appears to be a guard tower. cold, cloudy october. practically no one on the island. just some couples with dogs and a soap shop and a restaurant that appears to be a shack, painted purple, for rich people to spend exorbitant amounts of money on fish and chips. we turned left, instead, and traveled down the permit-parking-only road until we dead-ended at a parking lot. we stepped out of the car to the welcome of the wind, which could have toned it down a bit since we had to pull our hoods over our foreheads and tighten the strings. my hair kept whipping out and crossing over my eyes and into my mouth. we practically skipped across the boardwalk and under a wooden canopy, but then we were in the sand, blown from behind towards the ocean which seemed to be sucking up everything like a vortex. we stood at the edge of a sandy cliff and stared down at the water being pushed east towards england. we found a shell and we kissed, and then we started back, against the wind, toward the car.

i took two pictures. and i think i ruined my film in the rewind process, so i have to mention them so that they will Exist. in the first one, j. very courageously threw himself sideways into the grasses--both hands up and landing shoulder first--to simulate being blown by the wind. cut the palm of his hand and made me laugh. for this i was eternally grateful. in the second picture, j. stood with his back to the grasses and the wind whipping his hair sideways. the clouds in the background were full of holes and tectured like ripples in the ocean. he didn't smile. he just looked rugged, and beautiful.

last night we stayed up till after one, talking, remembering, chatting.

baking bread is a long process

So I was home yesterday, all day. what a difference it makes when you stay home instead of being gone all day. I had breakfast with j., baked a pie, learned how to use my bread machine to make sour cream and rosemary bread, took out the trash, cleaned the car, did the laundry, had dinner with K, and started a new book. (i sound like such the typical homemaker... i really enjoyed the day.)

I’m reading “the power of a praying wife”. Which sounds so cheesy and uber-christian… but I think will help bring my perspective to where it should be. I’m really going to try to pray more. It’s like marriage has shown me how completely incapable I am of changing myself. I try again and again to react differently to the same circumstances—to have different automatic responses. But I can’t do it on my own. this is not a sentence I say, but here goes: I think I need some sort of holy spirit, because otherwise I will fail over and over and will just slip into a despair that I can’t come back from.

The thing is, I have no faith. As soon as a part of me allows Hope to enter (that this holy spirit could transform me into a better person and give me the strength to face my life with joy, patience, etc) the skeptic in me starts berating that idea.

How to you gain faith? Do you pray for faith? Don’t you need faith to pray? Can one instigate the other? What if nothing happens? does that mean I didn’t have enough faith? Does that mean there is no holy spirit? Or that the holy spirit just isn’t in me??? these are things I don’t know about.

My praying wife book starts out by saying that we have to pray for change in us before we can pray for change in a husband. It really focuses on how we have to be willing for god to change us, because we can’t force the husband to change. When I asked j. how I could pray for him, he seemed so pleased and I was surprised that the things he asked for (discipline, follow-through, patience) were qualities that I most often am critical of him for not displaying. maybe my willingness to be loving, uncritical, prayerful, accepting, and to give it to god to change instead of trying to change it myself will bring about the changes in a way that I could never accomplish with criticism, demands, and to-do lists.

st. john's on vacation

so this is marriage.