The smell of home

What does home smell like? Fresh laundry, clean sheets, coffee, baked chicken in the oven. And so much more. Every home has a distinct smell, and perhaps because I have an oversensitive nose, I find the scent of home emotional.

Years ago when my dad did pastoral visits in the afternoon, my mom could tell him whose home he'd been to when he walked in their door for supper. I guess noses are hereditary.

More than smell, home feels like rest, even on the busiest day. Which today was not by choice. Sitting at the table this morning we simply watched the sun play games with the clouds across the yellow maple and red Bradford pear trees out back. The apple tree stands starkly naked and the forsythia are beginning to shed across the side. The tall blue spruce remains a sentinel to northern winters. The lilies and snapdragons are long dead and the pots of flowers drooping from the frost. Autumn, crisp and clear, fresh, and sweet smelling.

Driving across the middle of New England yesterday, stopping briefly to see my grandparents' home, we were surrounded with brilliant color and lovely views of mountains. But home, flat and middle of the country, is a welcome treat.

Little ones are playing in the cul-de-sac out front, not yet ready to don costumes and go door to door for Halloween. The grands want Poppa to come join them to traverse their neighborhood. The candy basket is ready on the front washstand. Another smell -- chocolate. Buy the candy you like yourself and you won't mind the leftovers...

Smell of home. Most of all it's a fragrance of contentment. That's the best smell in the world.

Roots hanging loose

Years ago, riding on a train across Poland, I wrote a poem called “Roots hanging loose” that described that out of body experience I tend to have when on the road. A call from the Driver this morning reminded me that once again, I am hanging loose with no roots. It’s been two weeks since I left home and there have been seven different beds with an average of two nights per bed. That’s seven different rooms, seven pack and unpacks, seven changes and hauling of suitcases, numerous loads of laundry on the fly in different machines.

Weariness sweeps over me. But beyond the weariness is a sense of not being connected anywhere except maybe to a keyboard.

That’s not to say that I am lonely. I’ve had wonderful conversations along the way with new and old friends. Lots of deep connections and rich encounters. And travel in the northeast in October can only be described as a feast for the senses. Crisp days, brilliant color, sweet smells especially when it rains and the leaves get ground to a golden slurry underfoot. We’ve seen frost and warmth, the ocean and lakes and rivers, woods and meadows and fields. Mist rising off rushing water, cows grazing in quiet fields, deer shyly dancing on the edges of the road. Despite a few traffic jams, travel has been fairly smooth.

And people. Eager students who want to talk about their spiritual walk. Hesitant students who have lots of questions. Faculty and administrators who share their hearts and lives and offices. Hosts who graciously open their homes and provide those beds. None of it do I take for granted.

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to stay in the same place all the time. Would I get bored? Would I be able to maintain deep relationships with people I saw day after day, as deep as those I maintain in quick visits and phone calls and emails? I’m sure it would happen, but somehow it is so far out of my realm of experience that I have a hard time getting my mind into that way of life.

I wouldn’t miss the changes. I would welcome the personal space. But I would miss the people, oh the people, and the challenge. No former students dropping by for a theological debate. No fresh faced young men picking my brain on music and art. No gracious older men and women sharing the breakfast table or popcorn on a Sunday night. No young working women pouring out their dreams and ambitions and frustrations.

Maybe I wouldn’t be myself. Roots hanging loose.

Purse praying

You know those times when your purse gets too full and you can't find what you want? You fish and dive, but it your search comes up empty handed, or worse yet, with junk that you didn't want to remember.

So you take the whole purse and dump it out on the counter. For me, the exercise means straightening out the pieces, tossing the wrappers and odd grocery lists and pieces of paper, sorting out receipts and filing them away neatly in a drawer, tossing more trash, finding things I'd forgotten I had. The end result is satisfying, and I'm ready to live again.

Genuine, gut-wrenching prayer is rather like dumping your purse on the kitchen counter. Preachers offer a nice acronym that prayer should be ACTS -- Adoration, confession, thanksgiving, and supplication, but as I read David's psalms of prayer, it seems like he starts at the other end.

He dumps. No other way to describe it. He dumps all he's feeling out on God and begins to sort through it, piece by piece. Some things get tossed as worthless. Other ideas are more important and get filed away for future reference. The good stuff gets put back in place.

By that time, he's moved through supplication -- aka the big dump or that technical word "imprecatory"-- and reached some thanksgiving. Often along the way he confesses his own wrongs and lays them out on the table too. Finally, he moves to adoration as he reflects that God, and only God, is above all and can do all.

I'm quite certain David didn't have a purse. He traveled light. But the purse of his heart and mind got overloaded and he liked to dump. The good news is that God seems not the least disturbed by his dumping and their relationship is the stronger because David felt free to throw it all on the counter.

The apple gatherers

Apple gathering and making applesauce has become our symbol of autumn. The Dreamer and I take off about ten in the morning with the Bear, the Bug, and little John-boy in their van, rain coming down in sheets. But, today is the appointed day so, rain or shine, we go gather.

The parents of one of the Dreamer’s friends have a smallish, well-tended orchard about ten miles north of us. We are invited yearly to gather fallen apples at no cost. Because they tend their orchard so dutifully, the drops tend to be perfectly beautiful apples but can’t be used in the cider mill or sold in their store.

Arriving at the orchard we navigate a muddy drive past the barn and make it to the rise without getting stuck in the deep mud. First conquest of the day! The Bug has fallen asleep in her seat beside John-boy so just Bear, the Dreamer, and I hop out, clad in slickers and mud boots. The rain is still coming down hard. The Dreamer and I fan out into the long rows, looking for the trees that have nicely dropped dozens of apples in the tall grass at their feet. Bear decides that dancing in the mud with her bright green smiley boots is far more fun than picking up wet, slippery apples.

In less than an hour we’ve picked up six bushels. Bug wakes up about halfway through and joins us gatherers, grumping and whining the whole time that she is WET! Duh! Nobody else is, of course. John-boy continues to sleep like a baby on a rainy dark day. We load the boxes into the van, make it back through the mud slide past the barn, and head for home. Opening the garage, we stow the boxes for tomorrow’s applesauce party, strip off our wet clothes in the laundry, and make hot soup.

Apple gathering brings sweet memories, each year different. One other rainy day my husband, the Dragon, and I did a similar one hour pick-up. Another time I took just Bear, a toddler, with me on a glorious warm day. The grass was so tall between the rows of trees that she kept falling into it, only to hop up laughing. Eventually she sat in her stroller watching me gather. One bright, warm September we just had Keren with us, a memory we’ll never repeat.

Last year the Dreamer, her sister-in-law, the Driver, a random Chinese student from Macau, and six pre-schoolers spent a lingering late October morning in the sunny orchard. It was so lovely that we gathered ten bushels and then had to process far more apples than we actually needed. Lesson learned: if the weather is lovely, watch out how many apples you gather!

In the rain today, there was no temptation to linger.

The applesauce somehow manages to last till the next autumn, a sweet reminder that it is till possible to make some things from scratch, simply and with little expense except our time. Tomorrow will be a long day of hard work, but the camaraderie in the kitchen simply adds value to the product.

There are so few opportunities in suburban American for this kind of experience. We’re already planning next year.