What’s Saving My Life Right Now :: Winter 2017 Edition

February 2, 2017February 2, 2017 Lindsey P. Brackett3 Comments

Also, these boots. Wal-mart. I’m not kidding. Kept me toasty warm for our one snowfall this year.

In these days of rampant internet-grouchiness, it’s nice to have an online “friend” or two you can always count on for something uplifting.

Modern Mrs. Darcy is topping my list for always answering my never-ending wondering What Should I Read Next? and she may (definitely is) responsible for the ridiculous number of thrifted/library sale/borrowed books on my TBR shelf.

Today our book loving community is linking up the small, yet notable, things saving our lives in the right here and now. Because I’ve found it’s most often in the small stuff and the menial tasks where I regain my composure and find my joy.

On my list for this Groundhog Day (really? Six more weeks of winter, I’ve heard. Except in Georgia, we’ve only had like 3 days of winter, so I guess it’s okay):

1. The Skimm is rocking my inbox. Y’all, I want to be informed, but sheesh? Is there anywhere online to read news that’s not biased/filtered/full of typos? Yes. Yes, there is. Sign up for The Skimm and get the biggest news of the day straight in your inbox. Best part–these writers are speaking my language, literally. This is the vernacular of the people, that is, those of us who want to be educated but don’t want to have to look up that word some CNN reporter thought was important to use but not important enough to spell correctly. Plus, I appreciate that, so far, they’re not leaning left or right but telling it like it is–with a little tongue in cheek satire for the kindergarten squabbles happening on the Capitol floor right now.

2. Reading Eggs. I told those of you who get my newsletter about Reading Eggs a couple of weeks ago. Here’s the deal: if you’re homeschooling (like me) or have a student who might be a struggling reader (like me) or find that you want to pull your hair out working through a reader with one of your kids (LIKE ME), go sign up for the free 4-week trial. There’s a talking duck and some games and actual learning happening here. Yes, it’s a computer program. No, I don’t believe kids should only learn from the computer. Yes, I’m going to pay for a subscription when our trial is up BECAUSE IT IS WORKING AND DOESN’T MAKE EITHER OF US CRY.

3. I’m composing this treatise during the YMCA Homeschool PE class my girls started last week. For $45 apiece, we get a 15-week class that lasts 2 hours. And there’s swimming. And it lasts TWO HOURS. Do you know how many words I can write in two hours? (Answer: A lot.)

4. The Mitford Books. I’m trying to be a better counter of my books this year. So far… I’ve written down two but I’ve read five? I think. See the problem? Anyway, there’s a long list of to-be-reads and want-to-reads and should-have-already-read but I keep coming back to the Mitford series, which my husband finds ironic since I directed the play last fall and you’d think I’d have read the books then. Yeah, not so much. I was a little busy with, you know, moving and editing my novel and directing my play. I’m picking up Mitford these days whenever I’m feeling low, whenever I’ve read something that makes me feel uncomfortable, whenever I need an immersion that’s soothing to my soul like a hot bath and a glass of wine… which I may be indulging in while reading.

5. Southern Living. I think it goes without saying that my mother raised me on Clemson football and Southern Living like any good woman from the Lowcountry should do for her children. But we had a few years where SL was not winning in the recipe department for me. Listen, if I can’t find this ingredient at the local Ingles, I’m not making this dish. But the 2017 issues are already redefining the SL kitchen with family-friendly, budget-friendly, live-in-the-sticks-with-only-one-grocery-store-friendly recipes. We have especially enjoyed this Chicken with Cornbread Dumplings as an (almost) gluten free alternative to my family’s favorite. I even made it with the frozen turkey leftover from Thanksgiving and it was like turkey and dressing in bowl with a side of comfort.

Conversations the latest issue of Southern Living causes with my sisters.

6. Writers Conferences. Finally, anytime I’m overwhelmed trying to figure out this homeschool/writer thing I’ve got going on, I take a deep breath and count the days on my calendar because FCWC is almost here. I’ll be heading out in nineteen days for the Florida Christian Writers Conference where I’ll be teaching How to Write Flash Fiction and hanging with my writer friends. For four days I get to be writer-Lindsey and nothing else and I cannot wait. Plus, it’s Florida in February which is pretty much perfect. (It’s also 15 weeks until the Blue Ridge Mountain Christian Writers Conference in case you’re wondering. I’ll be there, too.)

7. Meal Planning. I’ve always been a meal planner, but we’ve taken it one step further right now and made the attempt to stop my children from eating anything they find at any hour of the day. I’d say it’s working about 50% of the time. However, posting my meal plans is doing wonders for my social media interactions, so there’s that.

What’s saving your life? I’ve got some books lying around that need a new home. Leave me a comment and you might win one!

writing

Light in the Dark

January 30, 2017 Lindsey P. Brackett1 Comment

I taught my girls a social studies lesson last night while I made chicken enchiladas for the college students whose Bible Study we were hosting. Somehow, it is in the menial tasks that I find the courage to impart truth.

They ran back and forth between the kitchen and our big world globe and it took them far too many tries to locate Israel and its neighbors. It a few stumbling attempts for me and their father to tell them the little we truly know about those countries and their people. We talked about Abraham and his sons and God’s promises to both those boys that are being played out today in our lives right here in America.

We talked about how fear is strong but God is love.

And love trumps hate no matter if you’re left or right or stuck somewhere in the middle.

Then our power went out and the wind kicked up and snow and sleet poured down in fury and vengeance. For fifteen minutes, our world stayed dark and wind whipped the trees and we left dinner on the counter and sat in the basement.

Then the sun came out–so strong and bright I needed no extra light for the bit longer the power remained out. Golden light flooded my kitchen windows and pooled on our hardwood floors and there was no sign of a storm, only skies becoming bluer by the second. Skies that washed only a short time later with the brilliance of a winter sunset.

Because the light always triumphs over the dark.

“You are the salt of the earth; but if the salt loses its flavor, how shall it be seasoned? It is then good for nothing but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot by men.

14 “You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden. 15 Nor do they light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house.

–Matthew 5: 13-15 NKJ

Have you signed up for my newsletter? I’m sending out my January edition this week full of goodies like: the best book I read this month, the easiest pizza dough ever, which stage my debut novel is in with the publisher, and how you can join me in praying for our country.

just write life · writing

What the National Championship Can Teach Us About the Inauguration

January 20, 2017 Lindsey P. Brackett1 Comment

Originally published in The Elberton Star and The Northeast Georgian, January 13, 2016.

In a flurry of text messages, my book club girlfriends reminded me why we get along so well. Half of them didn’t realize the National Championship was happening Monday night either. In face, I was pretty pleased with myself for already knowing Clemson was playing Alabama for the coveted title—and I could even tell you who ‘Bama’s coach is because he’s brave enough to own a lake house in the heart of Bulldog country.

I had to respond with a “Go, Tigers!” because my parents are Clemson alumni, but it’s my mama who’s always been the die-hard fan. She threw a spoon at the television one Saturday night while cooking supper, and we kids learned to duck if Clemson’s defense wasn’t holding. (She’ll tell you I’m making this up for dramatic effect, but I promise it’s true.) This past Christmas she bought my cousin (whom she loves more than me during football season) a wooden ornament from the Corder’s General Store down the road. It had a tiger paw handpainted in bright orange, and Mama told Heather, “This is our year.”

Sometimes she’s a prophetess.

Because from what I hear, those Tiger-boys delivered an upset worthy of remembrance. Mama also says the last time they won a National Championship she was pregnant with my brother and now his wife’s pregnant with their son and she thinks that’s pretty profound.

I think it’s the perfect illustration of how we all love our connections to things that seem bigger and more important than our small, everyday lives. Since I knew I wanted to say a few words, I did a little reading and discovered Clemson’s beloved quarterback is a north Georgia boy, and I grinned wide over one sports reporter’s reflection. He watched that kid grow up in Gainesville to lead the rec league and the high school to accolades that probably felt as good in that moment as Monday night did with that biggest of college trophies.

People will say, after all, it’s just a game. But any coach or teacher or player will tell you the game can be so much more. It can be a place where weak boys learn to become strong men, where sore losers learn to become gracious winners, where the lost become the found. I don’t even have to follow a particular team or player to know all that is true. I just have to file back through my memories of teaching middle school or watching the Elbert County Blue Devils bring home their state title in 1995.

Now this game, that was played under bright lights and fought hard until the last moment, is over, and America is set to see the next one come to life. Soon we’ll swear in a new President, and there are those who swear they’ll never wear his colors. That’s okay. We don’t all have to cheer for the same team to recognize the end goal is about more than winning—it’s about how your character is played when your team loses.

Right now I’m watching the Inauguration coverage live… and have so much respect for Hillary Clinton’s attendance today and President Trump’s initiation of a standing ovation in her honor. It is my prayer that our nation would find common ground, once again, on the issues we all believe matter: kindness, goodness, selfless-ness.

amelia · clinically isolated syndrome · writing

Beyond Snow Days, Chronic Illness, and All the What-ifs

January 9, 2017 Lindsey P. BrackettLeave a comment

I get accused of not playing with my kids very often.

So at the risk of breaking my almost-37-year old neck, I played this weekend. By the end of Sunday afternoon they’d reduced the neighbor’s hill to ice and turned their cheeks the color of summer vine-ripened tomatoes.

Ah, summer. Come on back now.

As much as I’m learning to appreciate the hush of January and the sanctification of snowy days, I’m not a winter girl. I’m a curl up by the fireside and read a good book and drink a lot of coffee and make gigantic pots of soup while wearing fuzzy socks girl. Because I firmly believe winter should last about a month, give me one good snowfall, and then let’s move on because THE BEACH.

And also, I really, really hate to be cold.

Apparently I’ve passed these traits onto my oldest. She’s reading *Serafina and the Black Cloak* right now. I get it next.

Three winters ago we buried my Granddaddy on the coldest January day Georgia had seen in decades. It was six degrees. We wrapped my grandmother in a down sleeping bag beside the gravesite and I spent the next three months trying to get warm.

Two winters ago we checked Amelia into Scottish Rite in January and then in February, saw the demyleniating disease specialist in Birmingham. We left our other children scattered all over with friends and family and school was cancelled for days because the wintry mix north of 85 was constantly relentless.

So I don’t usually play in the snow. The cold gets deep into my bones and freezes my toes and I think of Laura Ingalls and the long Dakota winter, and I take back every wish I ever had to be a pioneer girl on the prairie.

See I learned a little something from my photographer friends about light. But that grin is all him. “I’m reading the Bible, Mama!” Don’t be fooled. He’s not always that sweet.

But yesterday, with the sun hanging low over that icy hill, and wearing Joshua’s snowsuit because the oldest daughter is now tall enough to wear mine, I sat on a plastic sled and careened down to the ditch and up onto the lane we now call home. At first, no one wanted to play. They’d already been out, we’d let them turn on screens and get cozy, and by the time I decided to retract my offer, my almost-seven year old was pulling on those hand-me-down Georgia duck boots our friend passed on this weekend and telling me let’s go.

For the past two years, every time I look at my beautiful daughter with her waterfall of dark hair that’s fallen out in a center patch on her scalp, with her right arm she only uses for writing and drawing pictures beyond what should be her normal scope, with her leg that hitches when she walks and wears her and me out to a physical and emotional impasse–I have only seen her limitations, her unknowns, her what ifs.

If Amelia falls down, I worry it’s her muscles tingling and not a mere mis-step. If she’s overly tired and weepy, I assume it’s her inability to cope with fatigue, rather than simple overexertion of natural play. If she can’t grip her pencil one day, or screws up her face while reading because she can’t get the words from her head to her lips, I am ready to call the neurologist or the occupational therapist or anyone who can make sense of what may or may not be happening in her little body, that despite all its mysterious challenges, continues to grow and develop and change. She lost her front teeth and they’re taking months to come in. Surely that’s a sign.

Yes. It’s a sign she’s nearly seven and growing up and I’m missing that because all I’m seeing is what may or may not be happening inside the body her therapist has always said is strong. She compensates so well, they say. She doesn’t slow down. She’s a fighter.

But most of all, she’s my sweet and sassy and steadfast girl and I’m missing her when I keep looking for an it.

I flew down that hill with her again and again. This daughter of mine who makes me see the world and her in it–alive and vibrant and unmarred as the snow when first it falls.

1000 gifts · Christmas · family · holidays · writing

That Time My Kids Almost Slept Through the National Christmas Tree Lighting

December 7, 2016 Lindsey P. BrackettLeave a comment

We hit D.C. last week. Yes, again. Sometimes blessings fall at your feet and I’m trying to be good about picking them up.

My mom arranged for us to receive tickets the lighting of the National Christmas Tree. The program is nationally broadcast (Hallmark channel this year) and features popular performers as well as a Christmas message from the President.

I’m sure some people come for the concert, no doubt. Madelynne did say she was more excited about seeing Kelly Clarkson than President Obama, and she’s twelve, so that’s acceptable.

Garth and Trisha were there–I was pretty delighted about that because my twelve year old self would have loved to see Garth Brooks or Trisha Yearwood in concert back in the day. Blooper story is that their mikes weren’t on and they had to start over. Joshua, with all his vast technical theater experience, said that was a really unacceptable mistake on the part of the sound guy. But they were gracious and funny about it.

Simone the swimmer read ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas with Michelle Obama, which was a lovely tribute to her Olympic accomplishments and proves we don’t all have to have Yolanda Adams’ pipes to contribute to the evening. (Her “O Holy Night” was astounding.)

We also learned about Chance the Rapper, so I’m feeling pretty hip in my pop culture knowledge these days.

Oh, and I got this text from Joshua at the beginning:

Littles are asleep.

Well, of course they were. We had a busy whirlwind two days letting the bigs catch them up on all the best of Natural History, American History, Lincoln Memorial, Washington Monument, National Gallery of Art, and Air and Space.