The clothesline.

When I was a child, my insatiable need to talk was only overridden by my eldest-daughter nature of following the rules. I was never the student who was designated a chair beside the teacher to keep me from disrupting the class, goodness no. However, I did spend recess sitting next to her on the bench while my classmates played, and often was given the desk closest to hers. Not as a punishment but as a reward. I found adults wholly satisfying to converse with, even when I was nine.

The gift of gab has followed me into my adult life, and at this point I’d say it’s been one of the most integral keys in any success I’ve found. I am very rarely at a loss for words.

A couple of years ago, I was sitting at my kitchen table with an open bible and a half-filled pot of tea. My journal lay beside me, pages filled since the morning had begun, and my heart was raw and aching from my oldest son launching into his own independent life as a college freshman. I don’t remember now exactly what I was reading, something in Galatians, or what precisely I was mulling over. All I know is I had one of those encounters that ended up shaping me and shaping the years that would follow it. There, I wrote in the margin a single phrase:

“How to be human?”

The realization was rudimentary, as I read that letter to the early church. It was a question with no answer. How exactly is a person supposed to be a human? What was meant for us by our creator? I guess the reckoning came with the truth that I didn’t really know.

I had, at that point, been living in this broken world for 38 years. Long enough to know humanity was a mess, and short enough to feel like maybe I still had time to do something about it. And in the wake of realizing just how fast a childhood goes by, I could only translate that knowledge into the realization of just how fast a life goes by. And naturally that begged the question of what exactly I was doing with mine.

When I was a chatty nine-year-old, we moved to a house in a sleepy neighborhood largely filled with retirees. I lived between two steep hills, perfect for sledding on the rare Arkansas snow day, on a road with giant hardwood trees and one-level brick ranchers. Our next door neighbors were in their 70’s or so at the time, and they had a clothesline in the backyard

I vividly remember one afternoon, playing in the yard while my mother was elbow deep in her garden, and seeing old Mr. Bill’s underpants billowing on the clothesline, stains and all bared for us all to see. It wasn’t public, of course, it was their backyard, and with privacy fences on both sides, we were really the only ones to bear witness to the evidence of Mr. Bill’s ineffective wiping habits, but even still, I was scandalized. And as expressive as I was, you better believe I said as much.

When I first took to a public platform, I thought, like so many do when they stand in front of an audience, that it might make me feel impressive, admired, seen in the best way. Instead, it made me think of my neighbor’s clothesline. It caused me to go through my life with a fine-toothed comb, constantly asking myself “Would I be ok if this made it on the camera? If not, why am I ok with it at all?”

It has been refining. It has exposed the imposter in me, the one so many of us deal with when we stand up to speak, and it has thoroughly, brutally killed the pretender. I have known, always, that if I were ever going to be successful, I would have to be truthful. I talk too much to take any other approach. I’d tell on myself. The metaphorical underpants were going to end up on the line.

So I’ve told you all my whole heart, this whole time. I’ve shared the struggles, the victories, the good, the bad, the ugly. I’ve cried over failures and dusted myself off again. I’ve spent the entirety of the last decade opening the curtains of the glass house of my life and letting eyes peer in. I’ve talked preparedness, resilience, I’ve shared my own tender process of learning to be human.

And now, I am finding myself in perhaps the most uncomfortable season I’ve ever lived in. I have so very little to say. God, the way I used to dream of the life I have now. The way I could cast a vision, paint a picture in my mind’s eye of a day full of meals around a hand-built table, surrounded by a hand-raised family, covered in handmade and homegrown food.

In the evenings, after dinner, we walk around the farm as a family and last night the boys stripped to their shorts and ran through the sprinklers that sprayed over my drought-ridden garden. I stopped to capture blooms and buds and funny birds with my camera. The world is rocking and sometimes I am afraid, but mostly I laugh with no fear of the future, because in all these years of teaching resilience and combing through my life to make sure I was practicing what I preach, I found a strength, a settled, sweet silence.

I don’t have anything to say. Do you know how uncomfortable that is for me? Do you know my prayer journal entries are short these days? Sure, it seems from the headlines there should be so much to intercede about, but I’ve found lately that my prayers are better infused in dough. I have found that the punching down and stretching and folding of a risen loaf express so much more than my words could.

I have tucked all the pain of my soul into soil, and the garden has never been lovelier. And the line is full of linen dresses and my favorite threadbare shirt. And I realize that somewhere, along the way, the scandal of messy humanity has worn off a bit for me. An appreciation for the grit of grief and gratitude has blurred the lines of what I used to wish to purge. At some point, the desire to make sure everything was bleached and crisp and ready to be witnessed faded, and I found that my precious life is frayed in places and worn soft like a favorite patchwork quilt.

My family, patchwork that they are, is too.

I’m sure words will come back, but I’m not so sure that explanations will. I think I learned far more on the bench with the teacher than I did in the desk of her classroom. This whole time, I thought living in a glass house meant offering a worthy display, but here in the quiet, I’m thinking maybe not so much.

Maybe it just means living the kind of life that doesn’t come with instruction but grants all the permission and empowerment someone else needs to live theirs too.

Your mind is darling, really. I love when you share your thoughts with me. Please leave a comment!

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