...sometimes, at the oddest moments, something unexpectedly fills your troubled heart with a sense of peace.

As is typical of a day in early March, in Wisconsin, the skies were a brittle pale blue, the sunshine clear and abundant and the westerly wind, full-force and biting.

I was driving, alone (which if you know me is a rare luxury) down twisting, deserted country roads, my car bouncing and jostling and threatening to turn into a kite and blow skyward at any moment.

I was on my way to a small town hall in the middle of nowhere to help set up a funeral luncheon. I have a fascination with funeral luncheons. Going back to the first one I remember attending for my grandfather, stretching through the ones I worked for friends of ours who own a funeral home and continuing on into the present. It seems, when you initially think about it, such an odd concept, really: food for the newly bereaved. Like in the midst of heart-piercing sorrow the first thing you're going to want to reach for is a hot ham sandwich and a square of carrot cake. But quite honestly, that is exactly the truth. Perhaps it is because of the memories certain foods stir up within all of us. Or maybe it is the nurtured and cared for feeling that follows being handed a stiff paper plate piled full of food you did not have to think about, shop for or prepare. Or then again, maybe it goes deeper than that. Maybe it is psychological and innate. Maybe after witnessing the fleeting brevity of life in all it's stark reality we instinctually grasp for what grounds us; what ties us to our existence in this moment, what fuels being alive. I have often wondered about it but perhaps that is the reason the first thing Jesus asked Jairus' daughter upon raising her from the dead was if she wanted something to eat. Hunger, being a sign of life.

The dirt and gravel parking lot was empty when I pulled in and turned my car off. Across the country highway I could see into the cemetery and witness the new plot being prepared. I watched the slow methodical work of the men and their machinery and the free-wheeling tricks of a hawk fighting the air currents directly above them.

It must be a thought-provoking job, digging graves. Peeling back layers of the earth, scarring it and fitting in the apparatus that will lower someone's beloved son or daughter, mother or father, sister or brother irrevocably into the ground. I wonder if they think more about mortality than the rest of us. I wonder if they ever stop in their work and say a prayer or are tempted to attend the funeral themselves and grieve with everyone else. After all, it seems rather personal to dig someone's grave.

When the others arrived I left the warm, sunny shelter of my car and joined them as they hurried into the compact cement-block building.

Well, we were out of the wind at least. But no warmer.

We took turns fiddling with the thermostat, supposedly on, and checking vents. Someone would invariably exclaim "I think it's working." And someone else, still firmly zipped up in their winter coat and wearing gloves would respond "I don't think so." We turned the oven of the outdated brown stove, (the color alone will tell you how outdated) set into the equally outdated and yet not without ironic charm kitchen, up to 450 and left the door ajar. We opened the heavy metal door of the furnace room and poked about. Nothing happened.

A fellow church member arrived, dropping off his wife's gorgeous four later cake for the dessert table and in black suit and tie he disappeared into the furnace room. Several minutes later we heard a click and then a rumbling, muffled hum.

Heat.

Never before had that cheery, indicative drone sounded so welcome. We nearly danced with joy and lined up to shake the man's dusty hand.

But no sooner had our well-dressed hero left to attend the funeral than the air inside the town hall filled with that distinctive assaulting odor they taint natural gas with. The pilot light had gone out.

Luckily we were in the midst of hauling plates and platters and cake pans out of the truck they arrived in and into the building. The doors were open and we left them so, despite the sharp wind, until I, for one, felt less light-headed and the air inside the town hall became clear again.

It was back to icy hands and feet and thick cloying steam clouds that rose in tell-tale fashion from the coffee cups we all clutched. Once again the oven was turned on and it's door propped open. The small kitchen became the really popular place to be.

In the end, after further investigating it was discovered the LP tank behind the building was completely empty. And when the series of phone calls we made to the people we rented the hall from remained staunchly un-returned, we surrendered to the cold and drank more coffee and hoped all the people soon packed into the place would warm it up some.

In the kitchen, the empty oven still baked away.

During the on again/off again drama of the furnace situation we continued to set up tables and unfold those brown metal chairs that are seemingly ever present in town halls across the country. We wrapped paper napkins around plastic silverware, laid out colored place-mats and draped the buffet line (card tables we duct taped and zip-stripped together into sturdiness) with plastic table cloths. We arranged lots and lots of food.

Comfort food, it was. Rife with memoriescn food. Take me back to my childhood and every church potluck function I ever attended food.

Crockpot beans and lemon squares. Creamy pasta salad with peas and powdered sugar dusted brownies. Rolls. Real butter. Punch.

We worked hard and talked. Talked like we seldom do in the after church rush to collect coats and kids and drive home and get everyone fed. It was purposeful and nice. It made me understand why, for generations now, churches have held potlucks and get-togethers. Why my own mother, in the Lutheran church I grew up in, decorated the altar every month with a group of other ladies; why my grandmother, despite complaining often, never did quit the church choir.

There is something so peaceful and unifying about work done with others, in the service of others. You don't often think it will be but it is. I set out from home on that early March morning wrapped up in unrest. Thoughts about all the things that seemed upside-down in my life swirled before me like an obstructing haze. Our church had lost a dearly loved member and yet for all my efforts I couldn't quite connect to this. It seemed another thing in our busy, over-cluttered, keeping with the culture and therefore appropriately disconnected lives today that can't quite penetrate as it should. And it gets added to the unrest. To the haze. To the upside-down-ness of it all.

But after all the work was done and I walked back to the parking lot beneath an ancient stand of giant, creaking oak trees, the sunlight dappled leaves of last fall crunching under my feet, everything suddenly flipped around. Like an egg timer being righted inside me just as the last of the sand was about to drain out. The haze and the unrest skittered away like the brittle oak leaves. There was peace.

I got into my car, watching the stream of mourners filter down the cemetery hillside, buffeted by the wind and bathed in brilliant sunshine. There was still the list of things, running somewhere in my head, of all I cannot change or control or even fix. We had only just begun to grieve together as a church body.

And yet there was food. There was the stuff of life. And it was ready and waiting and tangible. I may not be able to do anything about that list, the one we all have, the one that seems to grow and unfurl nightly like some smothering scroll while we sleep but you see, I could still make a ham sandwich. And cut a square of carrot cake. And serve it to someone on a stiff paper plate.

That much we can always do. And sometimes it is enough.

...the older you get the more the innocent excitement of the Christmas season fades away.

Well, Thanksgiving has come and gone. So, too, has Black Friday and Small Business Saturday. And even as I write this Cyber Monday is knocking on the door. You know what that means...

The crazed and consumer-driven commercialism that used to be Christmas is officially upon us.

Let the madness begin!

Suddenly as if with the flip of a switch there are about a bazillion and one things to get done. The turkey leftovers are barely chilled in the fridge and it's out to the garage attic to haul down the lights and the garlands and the Christmas decor. Then it's off to the tree farm to hunt down the perfect evergreen to prop up and bedazzle in the living room. Then there's the shopping. And the shopping. And the shopping. Making lists. Checking them twice. Hunting down and crossing off items in rapid-fire succession as though on some scavenger hunt our very lives depended on. And of course, let's not forget the baking and the party-hosting and the gift-wrapping.

Who can blame us when the real meaning of Christmas gets relegated to some dim, dusty corner of our subconscious. And before we know it the season has past us by in a blur of glitzy lights and glittery trappings. And that all too familiar yet inevitable disappointing let-down feeling creeps over us once again. And we're a bit surprised to realize the only serious concession we've made to the reality of Christmas is to watch It's a Wonderful Life.

Don't get me wrong. I love the blur, the lights and the trappings. I love It's a Wonderful Life. I think we all love those things. If you take a moment and watch the numbingly abundant Christmas commercials on TV you'll soon realize that they all seek to appeal to our united and universal love of those things.

Yet even as they do so, they subliminally pass along a deeper, more profound message. In their effort to sell Christmas through the blur and the lights and the trappings; the candles and the cookies and the diamond rings; the talking teddy bears and the brand new cars with the giant red bows what they are actually marketing to you is something much simpler. And something that can't be bought. It's a feeling.

The feeling that only comes with Christmas.

You know exactly what I'm talking about. It's that tingling sensation of excitement. That rush of knowing a good thing is coming and it's coming soon. That overwhelming expectation that leaves you almost literally vibrating with it's potency. I mean, it even has it's own cliche for goodness sake. "Like a kid on Christmas morning..."

It does seem that the most concentrated doses of the Christmas feeling are poured out on the very young. (Don't you remember the closer Christmas got the harder it became to sleep at night?) And then as you grow up the amount slowly lessens and the magic gradually dulls. I used to think this was because when you are young the responsibilities and the never ending to-do lists that accompany "the Christmas feeling" don't affect you. You are free to just enjoy and absorb all the wonder and excitement uninhibited.

But I no longer think that is the case.

Because I recently read the following quote and it has completely changed my mind...

"Christmas was foretold centuries before the birth of Christ. Is it any wonder that the Christmas season is filled with anticipation?"

That, my friends, is the secret. It's "the feeling". It's the magic and the excitement and the rush and the expectation all rolled into one. And it's what all little children innately understand. It's what all of us innately understood once upon a time.

Christmas IS the anticipation.

As adults we confuse this with stress and we translate it into a frenzy of more and more and more to do, to get done, to have completed and finish so we can just sit back and enjoy the season.

But that's what the season is. This crescendo of...well, of everything really. Memories and emotions and feelings. Peace and love and thankfulness. Humanity and humbleness and wonder. It's all building and building and building...

Until starlight and kings lead us on toward a manger and a baby and an audience of shepherds.

You see we aren't just yearning for the materialism this season has become so entangled with. Not really. Not deep in our souls. We aren't even eager to buy into "the Christmas feeling" all those commercials mimic and peddle. We know those are mere vague shadows that dilute and disappoint.

What we want is what the whole world has wanted since the dawn of time.

Him.

He didn't come as anyone expected, of course. We all know that. We smile, a bit smugly if we're honest, as we think of how very wrong everyone was way back then when they looked for the Prince of Peace in a palace and the Son of God in a position of glory and honor.

Yet for all we know...we fare no better. We look for him in glitz and glitter. In shopping malls and ornament boxes. In kitchens and in front of fireplaces and even in old black and white movies.

While all around us the very foundations of the earth are pulsing with the remembered anticipation of when love came down. When the promise was fulfilled. When God dwelt with us.

So this Christmas season celebrate the anticipation. Lay awake in bed at night overwhelmed with excitement. Feel the build up of centuries worth of waiting.

And then find everything you've ever longed for and more in Christ.

..."You are not who you think you are. Hardly anyone is."

Ok. Well, obviously someone told me. (Thus the quotation marks.) But not until I was 28. Not until I read it in a book and subsequently realized how much time and energy I had spent in my life pursuing something it appears I'm not meant to have a firm grasp on; who I am.

"I know myself, but that is all," Amory, the main character in F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel This Side of Paradise cries in a triumph, of sorts, at the very end of the book.

And maybe therein lies the catch. Maybe you can know yourself. But at the cost of knowing absolutely nothing else.

I wonder.

I remember reading This Side of Paradise in high school and loving it. Recently I read it again and you know, not that I didn't love it, but it was almost as though I was reading an entirely different book. Proving the statement I opened with? Or maybe proving I am not the same person I was.

Who did I think I was back in high school? Well, maybe we should go one step further. Who did I think I was in Middle school? That's actually an easy question to answer. I was the smart girl. The high-achiever. The student who was asked again and again to present her work to the class. The student who subsequently (duh) became known as teacher's pet. But thinking about it in recent years I've come to realize I was less the smart girl and the teacher's pet because that's who I wanted to be. And it was more a case of default. I was not popular. I was not pretty. I was not really athletically inclined, my grade school abilities having temporarily deserted me with the onset of puberty. So, ipso facto, academia it was.

In high school that changed somewhat. The awkward, uncertain and insecure tendencies of the 'tween years faded and a little bit like the ugly duckling turned swan I came into my own. But intelligence and eloquence still remained huge aspects of the "who I am" that I presented to the world.

Just out of high school I got my first job working at a coffee shop. And I loved it. As any 18-20 year old quickly finds out when they enter the domain of the working in the end no one really cares how much you know. It's how hard you work that matters. And I found out I could work hard. And in working hard, I could not only earn a salary, I could come out of my shell. It didn't matter if I got straight As or what my ACT numbers had been. It didn't matter if I remembered how to diagram a sentence or could recite the elements in the periodic table. What mattered to the people I waited on day after day was whether or not I listened. Whether or not I cared. Before getting married I would have answered the "who am I" question with a statement that centered around my job in the public and how much interacting with all kinds of people each and every day meant to me.

After getting married I found quickly myself as a newlywed, living in different city, without a job or a car, struggling to meet and get to know ANYBODY and wondering why I seemed so alone, so utterly and totally lost. (A very common tale, I'm afraid.) Then I got pregnant. (Another very common tale) and before I was really able to come to terms with all the drastic changes in my life I added the most drastic change of all. I became a mother.

Everything I thought I knew about myself and about the world got turned on it's head. Who I used to be, whether or not it was ever accurate, seemed so far away it might as well have been someone else. Suddenly I was swimming in a sea of hormones and sleep deprivation and guilt and worry and spit-up. Don't get me wrong, I loved my daughter so very, crazy much. (Still do.) But that in and of itself was part of the problem. This love that comes into your life when you have a child is so unlike anything you've ever experienced before. And though you may be half insane because you haven't been out in days and you're still wearing maternity sweatpants and your last shower is an event you can't even remember and you just want to scream from the mundane "feed, burp, change"-ness of it all, your child looks up at you and smiles for the first time and everything is forgotten. All of it. Nothing else matters and the world, just as it is, dirty, baggy sweatpants and all, is perfect.

Which is real, you wonder later when you're looking back? (Like I am these days; with a daughter closer to 4 years old than I can believe and more grown up and independent than those intense first 2 years led me to imagine as possible.) How it is? Or how it seems? The wreck I was so often reduced to one moment? Or the so-in-love-with-my-child-nothing-could-faze-me mother I became in the very next moment after that?

The answer lies, I think, in the words of a very moving book I just read. (And highly recommend.) It's entitled One Hundred Names For Love and it's the true story of a woman caring for her spouse after a severe stroke leaves him unable to speak.

At the end she writes "I am in a phase of life with responsibilities I could not have imagined during my boy-crazy high school years in the heart of Pennsylvania, when the Beatles tunes suggested that love was as simple as "I Want to Hold Your Hand." Like the teen years, this is also a passing phase. Be fully awake for it, I tell myself, pay attention to all it's feelings and sensations, because this is simply another facet of being alive, of life on earth, and then there will be another era when Paul will be gone and you won't have these responsibilities and worries."

Phases. That's all that life is. Knowing who you are is a never-to-be-attained reality because remaining in any one place for more than a mere moment in you life is also never-to-be-attained.

These days the books I read are (generally) on the lighter side and the world of periodic tables and diagramming sentences is a distant, foggy memory. My intelligence and eloquence have both stagnated. Instead, I know all the words to the "Cat in the Hat" songs, I can recite "If You Give a Pig a Party" and I can't remember the last time I called a toilet, anything other than a potty.

I don't get out much on my own. My circle of friends revolves around other moms and we get together so our children can learn how to play and share. I'm not exactly the "can talk to anyone, anywhere about anything" barista I used to be. Mostly I just find myself wanting to talk about my daughter. But seeing as how not everyone is as enraptured with her as I am, more often than not I just keep my mouth closed.

Even though I am still very much a stay-at-home mom my daughter is older now. She needs me less. I have more time on my hands. I can think about questions like "who am I?". I can come to the realization that I don't often know who I am. Nor do I always recognize who I used to be. I can even catch sight of my own reflection in a mirror and be surprised. (Because in my head I still see myself as the boyish and awkwardly immature 13 year old with short hair and glasses I was so long ago.) And I can write a blog entry about it all.

But in the end, it is just a phase. Tomorrow is not only another day but tomorrow I am another person, different than who I am today; whoever and whatever I decide that may be.

...that sometimes the abundant excessiveness of summer can become, well, excessive.

"But now in September the garden has cooled, and with it my possessiveness. The sun warms my back instead of beating on my head ... The harvest has dwindled, and I have grown apart from the intense midsummer relationship that brought it on."
- Robert Finch

Here in the Midwest, where summer doesn't begin to roll up it's sleeves and really get down to business until sometime in the middle of May, it always seems we are behind from the get-go. Like after so many months of dreary, unchanging, inhospitable Fall, Winter and Spring we are desperate to take full advantage of the nice weather. And we are caught in a game of catch-up.

If I've heard it once, I've heard it 17 million times..."There just isn't enough time to fit in all the summer stuff we had planned."

For there are church picnics and backyard cook-outs, Holiday fireworks and parades; camping, canoeing, fishing and hiking; neighborhood baseball games and tennis championships and rec. league soccer matches. In between all that fun the lists of must-get-to garden chores and lawn chores and outdoor housework chores seem to have no limit. Indeed, we spend all day outdoors, getting up at first light in the cool, quiet air on mornings when the sun rises earlier and earlier. And, likewise, we go to bed later and later, waiting for that same blazing sun to sink slowly away and the fireflies to illumine the still, humid air. We swim whenever we're near water. We eat ice cream every chance we get. We live in shorts and flip flops and sunglasses and slick ourselves over with so much sunscreen we might slip out of your grasp if you tried to hug us. We eat strawberries and watermelon and cherries and peaches until we can bear to eat no more. We devour in-season sweetcorn and tomatoes as though making up for lost time. (Which indeed, we are.) We plan family vacations and long weekends and road trips; often stacking them one on top of another until we haven't spent a full week at home in who knows how long.

And then we wonder, when that first sharp, crinkling, crackling hint of fall shows up one night in a cool evening breeze and the back-to-school supplies sit out on the counter and suddenly the porch light automatically trips on at quarter to 8, why we are oddly enough, ready for a rest.

A return to normal. A slowed down, paced existence. A schedule.

Growing up I always thought of Fall as the "dying" season. Though my favorite, there was, lurking in the background, that bittersweet notion of it being one big, drawn out goodbye; to all of the above mentioned things. Everything that had seemed so vibrant and full of life just a few short weeks ago suddenly begins to dull and brown and age. And while there's always so much beauty in that, there is also sadness. And grief.

But after reading a book about the seasons of gardening this spring I realized I had been looking at it wrong. It is not only us who are anxious for a bit of a rest come September. It is nature, too.

And that's what Fall is, I guess. A rest. Or more, a gradual wind down to a rest. Just like in any relationship, that crazy, dizzy, passion-filled rush of first love can only be expected to last so long, lest you self-destruct. And so, too, in nature, can the "intense midsummer relationship" last only so long.

So as the days grow short and the nights longer, as the blackbirds line the telephone wires and the geese fill the tempestuous skies with their loud calls, as the leaves begin to blush with color and the flowers in my garden grow gangly and sun-starved and weird, I will chose to look upon it all not as the end of something. Or even as the beginning of something else. But as a hard-earned, well-deserved rest.

.......that gardening is not a pastime. It is a way of life.

So seeing as how the condo board that governs the small-ish complex we currently call home has restrictions on bird feeders, wind chimes and potted plants my husband and I decided to take advantage of a community garden program we have in our town. And to satisfy our agricultural longings that way. For a fairly small fee we rented a 12x25 plot of tilled dirt just outside of the city limits. And for the most part it is ours to do with as we please.

No restrictions. No nosy neighbors complaining. No official letterhead notices from any condo boards.

Just before Memorial day weekend we prepped the soil and put in our seeds. During the following weeks of warmer weather we planted seedlings we had started in egg cartons in our dining room.

I felt oddly maternal about those seedlings. After nursing their very existence out of small contained cupfuls of dark, rich potting soil, watering them in our sink with the fine mist of our faucet sprayer, moving them from sunny window to sunny window through out the course of every afternoon, how could I not. It was disconcerting to merely plunk them down into coarse, grainy dirt, in the middle of an otherwise bleak and barren garden and drive away. I knew it was where they belonged but abandoning them to the wilds of the outdoors left me feeling more than a little anxious.

In the end, they did just fine. Surviving hail and hundred mile an hour winds, scorching heat and grazing deer served to toughen them up; toughen the whole garden up; toughen me up, as a matter of fact.

"Nature neither gives nor expects mercy," I read, in a gardening book, just hours before a stellar storm swept through our area and blew rain and trees and anything not nailed down sideways.

"Forget winning and cultivate delight," I read, in the same book, after seeing the damage done in a mere two days by a rather determined swarm of cucumber beetles.

To garden, in many ways, is to attempt order out of chaos; to conjure something out of nothing. It's a kind of biological alchemy in which you combine the humblest and most abundant of nature's components, water, dirt, sun and oxygen, throw in some sweat for good measure and hope for the best.

How hard can it be, you rather naively kid yourself in the beginning. Everywhere you look, things grow. Weeds in sidewalk cracks. Dandelions in otherwise pristine acres of uninterrupted grass. Stubborn leggy shoots off shorn, dead-looking stumps. Even the prize, perfectly formed pumpkin we brought home last fall and displayed (maybe illegally) on our condo deck was a volunteer specimen; growing and thriving quite nicely on some lonely dirt and weed pile in a vacant lot.

But you soon find out, cultivating life, and delight with it, is no small feat. You may prep and plant, water and weed all you want. You do not, however, control. Many of the parables Jesus told his disciples were agriculturally based. Perhaps because it was the best way he knew of to illustrate to people who thought they knew so much, about so much, that in essence they really knew nothing.

Growth is more than Science. A harvestable crop, more than hard work. Any gardener will tell you that.

I like to think we are past the intense, uncertain "baby" stage out at our garden. Gone, too, are the difficult, dramatic toddler years; maybe even the awkward, gangly adolescence. Things are in full swing and yielding results. We can see what we've got and barring some cruel act of nature (always a possibility) everything looks promising.

E and I were out there today working. Or, we were there today working out.

"You back is so lean and muscular," my husband commented the other day while massaging my neck. 'Let me tell you,' I wanted to reply. 'Those back muscles are hard-won. I have felt every single swing of my hoe.'

My knees, too, have felt the long crouching sessions. My eyes, the sting of rivers of sweat. I do have a nice tan and I've begun to suspect that the secret to strong nails is the natural vitamin B found in dirt. But my calloused palms and blistered feet may never be the same.

We harvested a literal bucket full of spinach and lettuce this morning. I'm not sure what we're going to do with it all. And this first round is only the beginning.

The weather was a perfect albeit odd blend of cool and humid. The lower night time temperatures were still battling it out with the warm earth and the result was a thick layer of damp, foggy mist. Without a bright sun in the overcast sky, there was no rapid burn-off either. It felt easy to toil away in conditions like that; Eden-esque, in fact. Everything was damp and moist and loose. The usual sun-baked, wind-blown feel out in that open field of garden plots was gone and there was a quiet, glistening hush all around. It's probably like that most days if you're there early enough. But we, of the deliberately slow three year old stage, are usually not there early enough. Someday, when Daddy is home two days in a row....like mid-July.....maybe?

But we are there, most days, none-the-less; me hoeing away the weeds that sprout and spread over night, long pony tail lank with the heat and humidity, any tan portion of my legs visible above my wellingtons dirt streaked. And E, smeared head to toe with caked-on mud, blond curls darkened and plastered to her head with the heat and humidity, sitting amid the newly hand-tilled rows. She generally starts off playing the water-fetching game, which serves to keep her occupied yet inevitably results in more water streaming down her little body than ever manages to stay inside the watering can and make it back to the garden. But after she tires of that and is saturated beyond hope she turns her attention to spearing small weed clods with a soil-polished sterling silver fork. Learning, first hand. Taking in this world of gardening the way our plants take in the sun.

The field of garden plots is adjacent to our city's jail (did I mention that?) and the inmates have their own section that they cultivate. E and I are a familiar sight to them by now and they stop and smile at her and comment on her helpfulness. In another time and place I'd have no shortage of unease over this. But somehow, in this acreage of lush green growth and vibrancy, it seems unremarkable. Normal. Matter of fact.

Like the line of unruly thistles that border the neat rows of our garden.

Like the chaos the exists, just beyond the edge of order.

We don't sense it all that often in the predictable drone of every day life. But it is there. As any gardener will tell you. And cultivating delight, amid the threat of ruin and disease and disaster, is the bigger picture we are all supposed to learn I think; the way of life tending a garden will teach you.

Thus the parables? I wonder........

.......that despite what the groundhog says Spring is always at least 6 weeks away.

In the Midwest, anyway.

The full moon that occurs in February is known in folklore and among Native American tribes as the Hunger moon. Because this is typically the month in which the heaviest of winter snows fall and hunting for food is virtually impossible.

Now, I am no hunter. And tucked snugly inside my second story condo I am relatively impervious to the record snow falls and blizzard-like conditions that have been such a fixture these past few weeks.

But I find I am hungry.

For mild blue skies. For green grass and bird song and fresh air that doesn't sting my cheeks and my lungs. I'm hungry for tender asparagus and wild strawberries; for sunsets that extend past 7 p.m. I'm hungry for Easter and Easter lilies and family get togethers that can comfortably take place outdoors.

In short I am hungry for Spring.

.....that we modern day Americans are a rather spoiled bunch.

Or maybe they do tell us we are spoiled. Maybe they tell us all the time. But as is typical of spoiled people (or nations) we just really don't believe it's true.

Personally I've never thought of myself as spoiled. Perhaps my parents or my brother or my husband would disagree. But even if they did and they admitted I was somewhat spoiled, they'd be hard pressed to say I was easily discontent.

I am very content. Oftentimes to a fault.

However, this winter has severely pushed even my limits. Endless days filled with gloomy clouds, brutal snows and frigid temperatures have worn thin my ability to cope. I feel lost in this limbo of needing to soldier through and yet wanting very much to just call it quits and hibernate until spring.

I am bored. I am numb. I am running out of ideas on how to entertain my energetic almost three year old daughter.

If I were to title this place in my life where I currently find myself I'd steal a line from Shakespeare (and John Steinbeck) and christen it 'The Winter Of Our Discontent.'

Truly nothing could be more accurate.

But over the course of the last few days, when a blizzard dumped a foot and a half of snow over the already snow covered Midwest and double digit, sub-zero temperatures have abounded and no one ventures out unless they HAVE to, I watched two very interesting shows on our local public television station. (Because, let's face it, what else is there to do?)

One documentary detailed the life of Spanish explorer Cabeza de Vaca; who, after being shipwrecked off the coast of Texas (before it was Texas) spent 7 years in either Native American captivity or in walking some 2000 miles across the entire country of Mexico. And the other documentary was about the fatally doomed Arctic Expedition of Adolphus Greely.

Both men dealt with conditions I could never, in even my most devastatingly horrible nightmares, conceive of.

Walking for two entire years?

Spending three winters stranded and lost somewhere off the coast of Greenland?

I can hardly take three months of winter; in my warm house, with it's warm bed and adequate supply of food and water and the electricity needed to run a computer and a T.V. and everything else.

How would I have survived if I had been with Greely's expedition? Forget the physical deprivations, what do you do all day, every day, trapped inside a crowded little tent? How do you not go completely insane?

Leaving behind the extreme harrows of exploration above the arctic circle how would I have survived a mere 100 years ago? Bitter, unforgiving winters are not new. No, the warm houses and electricity and running water we have to deal with them are. But more generations of people got by "the old fashioned" way than have got by in these, by comparison, rather unimpressive modern times. So in short, what's my problem?

I know, I know. I could delve off into musing about how much time I have on my hands. And it's true. If the well-being of my family depended on hauling firewood daily and getting up at five in the morning to light the stove so we didn't all freeze and continually chipping layers of ice off our collection of drinking water I'd have nothing left over at the end of the day to wonder if maybe there wasn't something a little more fulfilling I could be doing with myself.

But basically the problem as I see it is me. I'm spoiled. I want to do what I want to do, when I want to do it. Spend weeks on end trapped inside? Yeah, I'd rather not. So until I get my way (which, let's face it is never) I'm going to sulk and complain.

Pathetic.

There is a rhythm in nature, you see; an unalterable sequence. Winter follows fall. It's been this way from the beginning of time. And it's there for a reason. It reminds us that we are not omnipotent. We control nothing. Maybe that truly is a concept we in modern, advanced, technologically proficient America have a hard time grasping. Maybe it's a concept we fail to grasp at all.

Except in winter. When there is no short cut. When there is no lasting escape. When as we can do is surrender and realize to do so isn't the end. It's the beginning; of a life lived beyond the spoiled, selfish, truncated world of ourselves.

Let's face it, who among us would have created winter? But God did. So I, for one, am going to enjoy it.