I’m reading through them again this year – a current book, an Anne book, a current book, an Anne. And through the first couple I felt like maybe I’d lost the ability to crawl all the way inside. I was afraid maybe I’d grown up, God forbid, or that I was thinking of them too much like work since I’m using the read to get in the right frame of mind for a novel I’m writing that’s basically a love letter to these.

Then I reached the third book – the one where Gilbert finally proposes and Anne turns him down and my heart breaks in five million pieces like I’ve never read the end before. And I’m definitely curled up, crawled in, happily escaped  – all that. It’s in this book that Ruby Gillis dies and Anne faces a spiritual awakening. She refuses no less than four proposals of marriage as we see how beautiful she’s become – not just the star-gray eyes but the spirit and kindness and the heart that makes her as desired for friendship as for love.

Despite its random paragraphs on Theodora Dix and Ludovic Speed, or its totally frustrating interlude for a romance [that is equally agonizing and delightful BUT STILL] between two characters we’ve never met and will never meet again, this book is more plot-driven than the first two or a couple that follow. And it’s the real beginning for Anne as a grownup, which fully shaped me as one.

And thinking about all these things has made me wonder if maybe I feel slightly less invisible inside the Anne book I’m reading, because my life has filled out so richly around it. It’s influenced by her and filled with perspective and a love for beautiful things that’s inspired largely by her. But it’s my own, with its own spiritual awakenings and romance and occasional crisis and boys.

I felt worried when the first two in the series didn’t undo me quite like they had in the past. But now I like the idea that this is only because I’ve been so busy building a life that I think would make her proud.

*photo source

I love to be still. My favorite time of day might be the fifteen glorious minutes in the parent pick-up lane when I’m not at work but not yet back at motherhood, and I can simply process the day. I like to think about things instead of just letting them happen. I like to think about who I want to be and whether or not I am getting there.

I spend a lot of my day online, and I don’t let the chaos of twitter and facebook and blogs and Pinterest get to me. (I adore Pinterest with its snapshots of beautiful things…) But I do begin to crave the tangible. Do you know I still love the feel of the steering wheel in my hands? The freedom and rejoicing I used to feel at sixteen when I finally had the license to drive myself anywhere I needed to go, has really never faded. Even when my sister got her license eighteen months before, I remember thinking, “The Nickerson girls…with power.” And I can still conjure that small, tangible thrill when I grip a steering wheel today.

I still find grocery shopping almost delightful as long as I use the sturdy cloth bags instead of flimsy plastic. They hang in my kitchen – not yet on cute pegs on the wall, but someday. I hate the transience of grocery shopping – the inescapable realization that everything you buy will be consumed or wasted in 7-14 days and you’ll be right back there buying the same things again. Reusable bags add some permanence to the experience.

I like to make a bed or straighten a picture frame or dust a clear, smooth surface. I still run my hand along the newness of our table and smile. Pulling up the comforters on my children’s beds is ridiculously satisfying for me. A way to be grateful for the bed, the home, and the child all at once.

Isn’t it strange that you can sit in a quiet room, but if you’re surfing the web, it’s very loud? And yet I can feel more alone and dissatisfied in that noise than I do in the quiet touching of the little things that make up the life around me. Those of us who believe in the eternal aren’t supposed to set our hearts so much on things. I hear it often – it’s on a song on my radio almost every morning, “I was not made for here.” And I always think: I was. I was made for here. I know it every time I enjoy one of these fleeting silent moments. Every time I touch my life and wake up to it again.

I have a document on my computer, and a folder on Evernote, filled with writer quotes that ring true for me. And I fill it with my own personal rules too. Things like, but not exactly – because this folder is just for me – I won’t follow trends, I’ll write for the love of it, No unnecessary cussing. (Remember these are variations on what I really have in there.)

Well if, and I’m not saying I did, but if I’d been recently struggling to find the courage to develop yet another story, The Golden Globes went a long way toward the effort. Because where you might see a really long commercial for current releases and several DVDs or perhaps a mutual congratulations club among a group of people who take themselves way too seriously as often as they laugh, I see the inspiration to work hard at this thing called art, to believe in what you do, to do what you love, and to say something now and then – something that will last or at least for a moment, matter.

When Nathan Bransford asked, I chose from his multiple choice that I wrote to change the world. But I wouldn’t say that now. It’s more like I write to take the good things in the world and make sure you know they are there. Or sometimes, if I can accomplish it, to take the troubling things and make sure you know there is hope.

There is something I keep thinking about, though, and it’s this word: Honest. I haven’t worked it all out, why exactly I keep thinking about it. But it’s just a general feeling that I want to be all me, from the deepest part to the outer edge that people actually see. I want my efforts to match what I say is important to me, and my actions to match the priorities of my heart and soul.

I started this in years past, but I want to keep a list of what I want most and be deliberate about whether or not I’m pursuing them. Things like a good relationship with my kids and a place in the world of storytelling. It feels honest that I’ve written a handful of things in my day-planner so far this year: My next cancer checkup, Jake’s class play in February, and Awards Season (People’s Choice, Golden Globes, SAG Awards, the Grammys, and the Oscars). Not everyone in my life will truly get all the parts of me, but I like the idea of being all of me, all the time, whether I’m fully understood or not.

I’ve really always been known as honest, or real, as people say. And in my teens I developed a theory that it’s generally not that complimentary to be known as real, because real people tend to be too blunt and say how they feel without concern for how it might be perceived. I started praying that my real would also be kind. If I don’t think ill of that person, then I can be real with them without being mean. If I face the day bravely and with kindness, then I can be real about how I’m doing without being grouchy and a drag.

And that’s all a part of my word this year too. On Tiffany’s blog, I wrote that serenity is a favorite word of mine – getting older, I’ve loved trying to live up to the beautiful word my parents gave me as a name. And what could be more honest that that? So maybe serenity is also a good word for my year.

“You are one person, indivisible,” I quoted earlier on the blog. And that, in the amplified version, is my word.

~

*I used to clarify that Katie is only my cyber friend, someone I’ve met online but not in real life. But I’ve decided eventually some friends become the real thing, long before you meet them, and I’ve dropped the cyber disclaimer with these.

Why yes, I am posting this grin just because I want to.

It’s been a while since I posted about how much I love being a grownup, so I thought I’d go there again.

I love being a grownup.

I love being able to decide any given day what kind of person I want to be, and I love that I can take the steps to be it. Having lived a while, there’s even a pretty good stock of experiences inside that I can draw from to help me get there. If I want to be a more positive person, I can think of a ton of people in my life to learn it from. If I want to be more responsible, I think of the times I wasn’t and how determined I became to change. I’ve got education to build on, parenting history to grow from, friendships for support.

I love that I can eat anything I want but that I can learn to not rely on food so much for my comfort too.

I love having no less than one thousand relationship mistakes in my past to help me be a better friend, sister, wife, and mom tomorrow. I’m glad I’ve passed my driver’s test, gotten a good score on my ACT, survived high school, and faced life’s unpredictability enough to not be quite so surprised by it anymore.

Sometimes my kids ask me for a second dessert or to stay up late or some other thing that I can’t really approve in the moment, and I feel sorry for them. They don’t know it, but when they walk away I’m thinking, Just hold on, Buddy. Someday you don’t have to ask anybody about that. It will be all you. And when you get there, try really hard to remember how awesome it is to finally, finally be a grownup.

Dear Mom – remember all the money you spent on a hotel in Kansas City last year so chemo could feel a little more vacation and a little less I’d-rather-die? I was thinking this year you could spend fewer hours in a chemo pod – hours for which you didn’t get any blissful amnesia like I kind of did. Maybe the first few weeks of this year could have softer chairs, more movies in your living room and fewer on your computer, fewer daughters turning gray from sickness and blue from Methylene. That’s what I was thinking.

I was thinking of you too, Kelcey and Lisa – remember how you put up the finish line for me when I finished chemo? Well, this year it’s a starting gate. And maybe the year has trouble for one of us, but let’s assume it doesn’t. Let’s assume it only has good and wonderful and new and best. I’ll see you New Year’s Eve. :)

Michele, the Oscar party’s going to rock this year. I’m going to eat All the food. And we’re going to celebrate not that I made it to vaguely healthy in time for the party but that you’re off soon to a new adventure and I’ll miss you like crazy but we’ll find a way every year to swoon over the music montages again. We will also celebrate the gods of the Academy Awards who saw fit to bring back Billy Crystal and all is right with the world.

And Michael, I just discovered another great Taylor Swift song. I know. You’re thrilled. But if you’re deficient in rapture at that, I know your sense of endless possibilities for this year is at least higher than last. Though, as Taylor would say it:

You held your head like a hero / On a history book page

It was the end of a decade / But the start of an age

Long live

The walls we crashed through

While the kingdom lights shined just for me and you…

Long live all the mountains we moved

I had the time of my life fighting dragons with you

I can’t help it. I love a New Year. There’s so much potential for goodness. Especially when you’ve already proven, if you have to, you can handle the bad.

Have you seen this gorgeousness? The 100th Anniversary Edition of Anne of Green Gables? It’s quite pretty – a nice pale green background like Green Gables itself, or like the dresses Gilbert liked the best on Anne. Plus, it has the Gibson Girl model of Anne on the front, which actually is closer to Montgomery’s imaginings would have been than our dear Megan Follows (whom I love in the role, but I have to squint hard not to be bothered by her height as Anne was actually described as a “very tall girl”).

I gave this book to my niece Nola Serenity. I wrote inside, Dear Nola Serenity,  I know three things for sure…

1. I love the name that we share. It’s hard to live up to, but it’s something everyone desires, and I love that.

2. I love Anne of Green Gables. It has defined much of who I am. And if you read it someday, you’ll be reading pieces of me.

4. I love you. And you never have to do anything but live for that to be true.

It’s not an exact quote, but it was something like that. And you can see how much the niece and the book mean to me. Imagine my appall while reading that very version (which I eventually bought for myself) to discover numerous oh so many typos. Oh So Many. Over became oven and every, ever. (Or vice versa). But the worst, the most appalling, is when Marilla became Mania not once or twice but THREE TIMES SO FAR.

I’m very sad. At least, I was very sad. And I think I’ll buy Nola a different version one day that at least doesn’t replace the heroine’s life-changing benefactress for a word that is also a psychiatric disorder. However, I might be reconciled to the version for myself if I can believe this review on Amazon. According to its author, this book is true to the version L.M. Montgomery herself would have read the first time she saw her book in printed form – typos and all. Does anyone know if this is true? Because somehow, I am reconciled to the mania if when I read it I am feasting my eyes on the very same printing errors poor Maud had to endure while trying not to let them ruin the joy of finally having her book.

I just gave a beautiful classic to a work friend. It’s all red and white. It practically falls open for comfortable reading, and it has gorgeous untrimmed edges to its soft, old-fashioned pages. But now I’m terribly afraid Sydney Carton will be replaced with swine or something, and I’ll be so distraught! I’m just going to have to get more strict with this policy.

It’s not that I can’t cook. I mean, in the words of Rachel Green, How hard can it be? After all, you just follow the recipe. “If it says boil two cups of salt, you just Boil Two Cups of Salt.” So….yea. I can follow a recipe. It’s just that cooking is neither my gift, nor my joy, nor even the job I would put anywhere near the top of my list if the whole world lived together and we were doling out chores for the smooth operation of the whole.

In Omaha this month, we were running out of time to complete all of Charity’s brilliant purple snack ideas (for her daughter Violet’s First B-day party – how cute is that?), but I was all determined and in-the-spirit and demanded we get started anyway on the purple-tinted white chocolate frosting for the peanut butter balls I had so carefully stirred and rolled. But something went horribly wrong in both the mixing of red and blue AND in the melting of white chocolate. It got all clumpy and awful and completely ruined for dipping, plus the purple was too blue. So we smooshed lavendar and purple M&Ms into the top of the peanut butter balls instead, which worked out lovely but wasn’t even my idea. Charity was a peach about the whole thing. Felicity is probably laughing even as she reads this and would never have let me live it down at the time. It was classic Serenity – failing at cooking so simple the word balls is in the title.

But this week when someone called and asked me to provide a dessert for the hard-working college students and young leaders who hang with my sixth grader and teach him the bible through programs and events at K-Life, I agreed without a hint of panic; I’m always looking for what I’m supposed to give, and this was perfect. And not only that. When she said it was a traditional Christmas dinner – ham, turkey, the works – I knew immediately what dessert I wanted to make and it was way, way over my head.

It’s my absolute favorite – my favorite to eat, my favorite to say – I mean, it’s three of the prettiest words: Red. Velvet. Cake. And I knew I wanted to not only make it, but I wanted to make it The Aunt Joyce* way, which I had never done before.

I tried to talk myself out of it. I mean – the Multiple Levels of Fail that were possible with this undertaking were not to be underestimated. It has four layers that you make by cutting the normal two layers in half. It has an old-fashioned milk-and-flour frosting that has to be blended for, like, fifteen minutes. That has to be chilled. And then it has to be frosted without ruining the creamy whiteness with all the red crumbs I was bound to stir up with my efforts.

You can probably see where this is going. Otherwise, believe me, you wouldn’t be reading about red velvet cake right now, more like an expose on how we’re not all meant to do All The Things. Instead, I totally nailed it. It tastes like heaven – I know because I scraped the cake pans and the frosting pan myself. It looked perfectly white on the outside. And perfectly Christmasy too with two red and white striped peppermints on the top.  Apparently I can do All The Things. Or in the words of Joey,

When you want something bad enough and your heart is pure, wondrous things can happen.

~

*I totally cheated and used a box for the cake. For the frosting you cook a cup of whole milk and 3tbs flour, stirring constantly. Chill that. Cream 1 cup butter, 1 tsp vanilla, 1 cup sugar until super, duper fluffy. Blend the two mixtures together until smooth and spreadable. Always keep refrigerated.

For me it always seems a little too tied to money. If I can’t afford all the things on the kids’ lists, it feels too familiar – to the Christmas when John wanted a puppy, for instance, and the timing didn’t seem right so we decided to forewarn him that it wouldn’t happen and I spent half an hour in the bathroom SOBBING because we had just ruined his belief in Santa, in us, and in the magic of Christmas in one fell swoop. Or I’m reminded of all those Christmases when we waited until the last minute to buy gifts and then put them on a credit card because there really wasn’t any other way, and then the heart behind it all just seemed completely ruined.

I always want Christmas to feel exactly like the shopping scene in the new Miracle on 34th Street – the sidewalks of Manhattan, ice skating in Central Park, twinkly lights everywhere, and Kenny G playing the aforementioned saddest happy song on the PLANET in the background. But there’s so much of it that doesn’t feel like that. Wal-Mart on Black Friday, for instance. Being on one too many Secret Santa lists (or three or four too many). Not knowing how, among all the gift exchanges and grab bags and last-minute forgottens, to live out the words of that beautiful song from our Christmas video two years ago:

All that I want for Christmas, is to give my love away.

Feeling emotional at Christmas is like having the baby blues after delivery. Many people go there, few confess. We know the happiness is bigger than the ache, so we ignore it or pretend it’s not there or actually forget about it when everything finally comes together and we finish our list or sometimes after we’ve only just begun but have realized there are perfect gifts for perfect people to be found.

Maybe you’re away from home for the first time or there’s someone missing that should be with you still. Maybe you were hoping some things would have changed by now, and they haven’t, or you can’t stop wishing for all the things that have changed that you sort of want back the way they were. I can’t actually help you. That’s the problem. I don’t have the magic. But I do believe in it. And every year, without fail, I see it at some point again – those moments that make me believe, seriously, a black night, frightened shepherds, and plain, plain people with a quiet, scandalous birth…but the angels filled the sky. They filled it and they sang and it was ridiculous and amazing, and it shouldn’t have happened and surely it couldn’t be happening. And yet it was. And it did. And there are still moments to be found today that make that ridiculously magic story seem totally and completely possible and true.

Find yours. Look for it in your children, your best friends, your mama, your neighbor, the child who gets a shoebox full of goodies thanks to you. Know you’re not alone in the sad. But that none of us have to get through without the magic.

I always think I’m doing okay at life, taking it in and relishing its good things like I mean to. I even take pride in how often I avoid its speed and chaotic filling up of every single day. But then a holiday comes, four quiet days to do only the things I love most, and it’s sort of like seeing them again after a really, really long sleep.

Oh, hello, tall boy. You’re twelve now, and I knew that – I noticed after all, when you first came into life and every anniversary of that day since. Still, it’s nice to look at you, watch you savor your happy things as I savor mine.

And speaking of my happiness, hello, dark table. You’re the largest of the prettiest things I notice at home. You make supper better. And birthday cake. And the rounded edges of folded shirts and pajamas. I like your rich color and your still-brand-newness, which reminds me we just don’t see you enough.

I haven’t seen you in a while. That’s what I say to the top of the bright white dryer after sorting and putting away the heaps of things that have piled there. And what a useful white shelf sits above you when it’s not crammed with things that don’t belong. Little white vase and white flower, photo of my sisters in a frame, detergent, softener, and scrub brush: Welcome to my zen.

I’ve been meaning to finish you for a while, Ms. Voskamp. And you didn’t disappoint. This post is sort of inspired by you really. A list of noticed things. And a bright hello to the books unfinished on my computer or not yet begun in a folder marked ideas. I had time to think of you this weekend – big, long quiet after late, creative nights and long, restful sleep. I like you again, very much actually. I’ve planned our whole future together. I hope you cooperate, but I’m not worried. You’re my favorite work.

Hello boy of ten. I see those eyes and how they’re aging you. A child’s are found about half-way chin-to-crown. Did you know that? Yours aren’t there anymore. And they crinkle when you smile. And they’re Papa’s. Except they’re not when I take the time to look. They’re yours. All and only yours. Just like your comedy and your heart.

My bright, bright sunshine of five. I see your cheek before I press my own to it, praying I’ll never forget how that feels. Your hand still wants mine when we walk, and I love that. You’re right, you know. I said, “Will you always stay little for me?” And on my lap you said, “I think not.” And your brave and blatant fineness with leaving me someday made me almost as happy as the fact that you happily curled up with me then.

Hello, cat’s purr and heater’s whir and the ticking of the clock. Hello twentieth-century fox, how I love your sound. I’ve missed the noticing of all these happy things, the deep, satisfaction of really seeing them and truly taking them in. This morning I sat alone with the bread and the cup. I love how they feel, I love the lingering taste, I love the hot tears I welcome every time I hold them and think of the one I believe in who made me and watches as I notice all these happy things.