Sing out, O Muse!

I will begin with some of the usual reporting of our family and our life in the ordinary. But there is something extraordinary in this post. There has been something extraordinary in our lives, and it is filling every ordinary moment we're having with electricity. I am working on increasing my appetite for joy, and yet staying in the moment. It's a work in progress.

On Palm Sunday I dropped Jon off at the airport in Colorado Springs at 6:15, and then took the kids to church for their children's choir performance. It was extremely lovely! I'm grateful for the saint who is working with them and has revived the children's choir. I know it's been enriching for them.

Spirit Week at the middle school contained a couple of days without Jon, but I wasn't going to miss an opportunity to practice retro hairdos! Tuesday was 20s day, Wednesday was 50s day:
Friday was 80s day! You know I had a totally rad time with that.

So many thanks to Dad and Agnes, who remembered our 12th Anniversary and sent us flowers on Good Friday. They are still fresh and filling our room with spring aroma. I realized it's been many years since I've had flowers in my house. I've been trying to grow the same four jars of beans since November, and still failing, so I tend to think of plants as things that would be better off without me around them... But what am I going to do, kill the cut flowers? I should buy flowers more.
Easter was delightful. We got up early, as is our custom, to go to church for the earliest possible service. I was disappointed that it wasn't a vigil service, though, but an ordinary mass! It just started in candlelight. Next year I will be sure to find a vigil; that's my favorite service of the year. For the first time, we attended a church that had an Easter Egg hunt, though! So that helped make up for it. I sang in the choir for the second service, which was fabulous! And then the romp began. The lovely woman who planned it got WAY too many eggs, so by the end they were begging the older children to help clear the eggs from the tot area. We still have plastic bags FULL of unopened eggs. But the kids felt like leprechauns at the end of a rainbow!                                                              Miles' third year in a row in an Easter dress. There are lots of people at our church who think we have two daughters, and that's fine with Miles. He says, he doesn't mind if people think he's a girl, but he corrects them because he just wants them to know that he IS a boy. He is and forever will be his own person.                                                                                              I had someone snap a picture as it had been a while since we'd had a family photo. Too bad it's so backlit, but it's otherwise pretty good!                              And then it was Easter Monday, and I was back at work for a teacher work day, planning with my teammate, when I got the texts from Jon, and we learned his mission out East had been successful: Geneseo had offered him a job!

Geneseo, where Jon will work.

And at last the terrible suspense in which we'd been living for weeks was ended, and the dream became real. We are moving to Rochester this summer!

Rochester, where we'll live

 My children will live near their Grandfather (and nearer to their other Grandparents), with their cousins, with their aunts and uncles, with so many friends I have loved my while life. My children will play in Lake Ontario every summer and see the real autumn leaves and play in the deep snow and smell the lilacs in May. I will get to live near Leah, in the place where I grew up, where anytime I go to Wegmans I might run into someone I've known since childhood. I still can't believe this is real; I have wanted this for so long! In two months, we'll be done with the school year and the packing will get serious; Jon's first day of his new job will be June 28th!

Some celebration was in order. Time for another visit to our favorite celebration place. Jon and I first visited Tres Margaritas on our recon visit in 2016 and it's been a favorite place for birthdays and family time. We got to have another evening of mariachi and Mr. Magic!
 
                                    I am trying to pump as much love into my last two months here as I can. I'm trying to stay present with my sixth graders (it's HARD, man; I am so over this school year!) even while I'm applying for jobs. I'm trying to cherish my runs with Koopa around town, the gorgeous views, even while I'm compulsively checking Zillow and worrying about how we're ever going to get our house sell-ready while we're still living in it and working full time (any tips for this appreciated, Melissa!). I'm trying to enjoy ordinary things, like our choir anthem today or our trip to Home Depot with Adele's Daisy troop yesterday.                                               Or in another trip to El Pueblo Museum to buy Pueblo paraphernalia at the gift shop while Adele played in the teepee and with the chuck wagon.



I'm alternately exultant, and then worried. All my anxieties are spiking; something is bound to go wrong, right? Melissa gave me a valuable reminder via this Brene Brown clip: this inability to accept and enjoy the good, and constant fear that it will somehow be taken away, this is just my unwillingness to be vulnerable. And if you can't be vulnerable, you can't be happy. Ever.

I'm going to open my heart, like Ruth in A Raisin in the Sun:

RUTH  (Struck senseless with the news, in its various degrees of goodness and trouble, she sits a moment, her fists propping her chin in thought, and then she starts to rise, bringing her fists down with vigor, the radiance spreading from cheek to cheek again) Well—well!—All I can say is—if this is my time in life—MY TIME—to say good-bye—(And she builds with momentum as she starts to circle the room with an exuberant, almost tearfully happy release).... then I say it loud and good, HALLELUJAH! AND GOOD-BYE MISERY ... I DONT NEVER WANT TO SEE YOUR UGLY FACE AGAIN! (She laughs joyously, having practically destroyed the apartment, and flings her arms up and lets them come down happily, slowly, reflectively, over her abdomen, aware for the first time perhaps that the life therein pulses with happiness and not despair).

Ok, so my life in Pueblo has NOT been misery, or anything comparable to a roach-infested southside Chicago apartment. But I admire how when the good news came, Ruth just opened up to it and let it fill her up. 

Jon meets with a realtor this week. We leave in two months. Allons-y!

(Odysseus arriving in Ithaca)

The Holy Faith of Saint Francis

Not a great picture, but I just loved the outside of our B&B by night. Adobe and twinkly lights, just like I wanted!

 Title taken from the official actual name of the city we visited, The Royal Town of the Holy Faith of Saint Francis. Saint Francis images were everywhere, including in our suite. Isn't it cute? We had the option to light a kiva fire, but as it was QUITE warm enough, we declined. When Jon asked what I wanted to do, I just said, churches. I want to see churches. I have a real romantic attraction to old churches. So, we saw churches. First, the oldest church in the United States, San Miguel. We saw the original steps, built in 1610!                                                                                                           Below and to the left, you see the Loretto Chapel, commissioned by French nuns for a girls' school in the 1870s. To the right, for something completely different, an adobe hotel and spa.                                    It is the home of the miraculous staircase, so cunningly built that it didn't require a support beam.                                                                                                 Finally, we visited the Basilica Cathedral of Saint Francis, also 19th Century.                                                                                                     First, we stopped and admired the statue of Saint Kateri, the first native American saint ever canonized.
                                                                                                                                 All the saints on the altarpiece are New World saints. I wished I'd had longer to learn about St. Martin de Porres of Peru! It's nice to see Guadalupe looking as brown as she ought to look; too often she's whitewashed.                                                                                                                   I happened to have a dollar in my bag, and Miles said he'd like to light a prayer candle. He packed a lot of prayers into that candle. We prayed for Melissa, and for Papa (who went on a work trip today) and for our family, and for Miles' wrist to feel better, and and and... It's a bright candle, I think we're covered. :-)                                                                                                             Outside, one of MANY many statues of Saint Francis. He's really everywhere. If you like Adobe, turquoise, Saint Francis, and (New) Mexican food (and who doesn't??!), come to Santa Fe!                                                             Below: the Plaza. People from surrounding reservations sit all around the border and sell crafts.                                      As we were getting ready to say goodbye, we happened upon a military fort that had been turned into a park. It was almost a dead vertical, so a little bit tiring at 7199 feet, but the views were worth it. The landscape and buildings are just so lovely. One pleasant addition: because of all the groves of pine trees everywhere, we had a lot more birdsong than we're used to in Pueblo! On the road back, we stopped at Las Vegas, New Mexico, as our friends had recommended a restaurant. This mural depicting the history of the region caught my eye...                                     Charlie's is a two (fat!) thumbs up, by the way. Oh my. We felt we'd never feel hunger again. We brought baked goods and tortillas with us, because we couldn't not, Lent or no Lent. Below, my stuffed sopapilla and pozole. Thoroughly sublime. WOULD EAT AGAIN.

                                                               On the journey, we listened to and read along with Death Comes for the Archbishop, a novel by Willa Cather roughly based on the lives of two French priests in the newly formed diocese of New Mexico. It is much better than I'd expected! I think I expected Cather to be grimmer, somehow... but this is exquisite, and so lovingly depicts the region that it formed the perfect backdrop against which to travel through northern New Mexico. Several times Cather describes places we'd travelled through or seen. And, there are just so many lovely little stories and thoughtful observations. I will leave you with one favorite from the Bishop himself:                                                                                                                             “Where there is great love there are always miracles,' he said at length. 'One might almost say that an apparition is human vision corrected by divine love. I do not see you as you really are, Joseph; I see you through my affection for you. The Miracles of the Church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.”

Bandelier

Spanish Peaks, on the way down

I have longed to go to Santa Fe ever since we moved here. It just seemed so romantic to me, all adobe and elevation and twinkly lights. I had been saying to Jon, we should go there for our anniversary! And he would always return, "yeah, who's going to watch the kids?" And I was always stumped. Until I showed Jon pictures of a little bed and breakfast that had suites, and we decided: we'll bring the kids with us on our 12th anniversary trip!
                             That's the actual Rio Grande! I still can't believe where I live, sometimes.
                                  We started our trip at Bandelier National Monument to see the dwellings of the Ancestral Pueblo People. Crazily enough, what stood out to me about the area around Santa Fe is how green it looked, thanks to the forest of conifers EVERYWHERE. No grass, of course, and minimal shrubbery, but lots of pines and firs and junipers, etc.

The kids kept playing Pooh Sticks at all these little trickling streams.

                                   You could climb any ladder you found and pop into the dwellings and pretend you lived there. The kids scampered up and down ladders and we just kept up with them. It was about 65 degrees and partly cloudy and perfectly pleasant! Though we had a laugh that no matter how far south we go for our anniversary, we never get truly warm weather. Even the year we went to Charleston!                                                              There was a lot of birdsong, and softly filtered sunshine. We'd done a lot of driving, so we were all refreshed by the outdoor time. One of the things that a dry climate does is to make the outdoors seem terribly clean. There's none of the mud and leaf mold that I remember from forest walks in NY. There's a lot to enjoy about desert life. We stayed out till almost sunset, then grabbed some New Mexican dinner-- my second feast of the trip! The first was in Taos. Oh my word, I'm sure I'm five pounds heavier than when I left.                                                                                                               It feels good, getting out on these Western safaris when we have a chance. We don't know how many years we'll be living out here, and I'd hate to think I hadn't taken advantage of an opportunity to see something I couldn't have imagined ever seeing, just a few years ago.