Autumn

I'm convinced that humans have a "harvest everything" gene that is triggered by the onset of cooler weather. When we got back from traipsing around the West the cooler weather followed us home and now the days are GORGEOUS and the nights downright chilly. I'm enjoying the coolness after the sweltering summer (but not enjoying the return of the perpetually frozen extremities--my feet won't warm up until March). I'm also suddenly motivated to cook and bake and clean and organize like a crazy person. I think there's some leftover instinct that says "Winter is coming! Get ready to hunker down and hibernate!" Well, if it involves apples by the pound and homemade spice cookies, I don't mind if I do.

I love autumn. I love the crispness of the air and the honey-golden light and the sense of harvest and plenty. I love the anticipation of the holidays. I love the food. I love watching the leaves change colors. Autumn is even more fun now that I'm no longer in school and trying to figure out if I will survive midterms so I can make it to Thanksgiving break. I can sit back and enjoy it. I can go on walks just for the sake of being outside and not dissolve into a sticky puddle of sweat. I can actually take the time to bake all those spice cookies and apple pies I want to eat.

But mostly, autumn is beautiful. Every time I go outside I'm amazed by it. I mean, seasonal transitions don't have to be beautiful. Things could just wither up and die in the face of colder weather. But instead, we get golden light and blazing leaves and so many many colors. I love that. I love that God engineered it that way. The beauty and majesty of nature have always been a testimony to me that God is real. I can't imagine that such brilliant and amazing diversity and wonder could have come about by random chance--there has to be some organizing force behind it. As Alma says in The Book of Mormon, "...all things denote there is a God; yea, even the earth, and all things that are upon the face of it, yea, and its motion, yea, and also all the planets which move in their regular form do witness that there is a Supreme Creator." I'm so glad our Supreme Creator is an artist.

photo cribbed shamelessly from Google

Family, zombies, and chicken pot pie

Sorry I missed a week, but I was away from a real computer and there ain't no way I was blogging from my tiny phone screen. Texting is enough of a challenge.

The reason I skipped out on writing is also the subject of the blog today. The husband and I went off to the West for a week and a half, him to go to a conference and me to go party with my grandparents. While he spent the days learning about how to efficiently clean buildings, I reupholstered benches and sewed and dug up pumpkin vines (which is a little like picking up an alien--you pick up the roots and start walking away toward the compost pile while 30+ feet of tentacle-like vines come dragging after you from all directions). Once the conference was over, the husband and I met up with his brother and sister-in-law and all trouped up to his parents' house to spend the weekend and celebrate his mom's birthday.

It was a great vacation, full of family and fun and good food. We laughed, we talked, we gardened, we dressed up as zombies for a zombie race and terrorized the "survivors" (and afterwards drove around Rexburg yelling "BRAAAAAAAAAAIIIIIIIIIIIINS" at all and sundry), and just enjoyed being together. I don't know exactly what Heaven is going to be like, but I hope it's like that--spending time with the people we love, surrounded by family. Laughing together. Doing stupid stuff and sharing inside jokes and eating too many donuts because you're up late talking.

I've been really blessed by my family. They're all wonderful people. And I married in to a great family as well (my in-laws are better than yours. The end). I am grateful every day that I have so many wonderful people in my life, and I'm especially grateful for the sealing covenants and the knowledge I have that death is not the end--we can be together after this life is over. That is a truly beautiful thing.

The Lord of the Rings

I love books. I always have. My parents read to me regularly in my childhood and I was always hauling books home from the library and classroom book fairs. My life was filled with The Wizard of Oz and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Little House on the Prairie (and one particular book about cephalopods I checked out of the library every chance I got. Yeah, it confuses me too.) Then I was introduced to The Chronicles of Narnia and The Sword in the Stone and A Wrinkle in Time and The Hero and The Crown. I devoured everything that came my way. In junior high I spent as much time as I could in the library because junior high is wretched and I wanted to get away from it as often as possible. As E.B. White said, "A library is a good place to go when you feel unhappy, for there, in a book, you may find encouragement and comfort. A library is a good place to go when you feel bewildered or undecided, for there, in a book, you may have your question answered. Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people - people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book." Books help you learn. Books help you think. Books help you encounter views and situations that are different from your own. Books help you define and articulate your world. Books, real books, good books, make an indelible impression on your soul.

The Lord of the Rings wasn't the first book to leave a impression on my psyche, but it may have made the deepest impression. I love the beauty of the language. I love how its written. I love that it's prose written like poetry, bright and clear and bittersweet. I love the great sweeping epicness of it that all hinges on the courage of one small person. And the thing I love most is the truth in it. I believe there's truth in all good literature--that thread running through it that winds around our hearts, those moments that linger in our minds and makes clear to us something we didn't quite know before. That something that impels us to reread a passage because it touches our souls. Tolkien put a lot of truth into The Lord of the Rings. He spoke about loyalty, love, and courage; hope even in the darkest hour, nobility, sacrifice, compassion. He spoke beautifully of profound truths that are equally as applicable to this world as to Middle Earth. And this, to me, may be the most profound: