last full measure

I breathed heavily, my lungs stinging as I took in a breath and released it in a moist fog. The wind whipped wildly and violently tossed the innocent, light feathery flakes of snow. It was really the only beauty I could see. The ground was brown with upturned earth, and the peaceful snow turned to slush by the constant tread of feet. I blinked to clear my eyelashes from the snowflakes as my buddy next to me cleared his sinuses. His pants were smeared with blood and I wondered if it was his or somebody else's.
Screaming and yelling rose and fell around my ears. I'd grown expectant of the constant noise but not immune. It shattered the quiet of the falling snow and unfailing wind and the occasional whistle called me out of the dream-like trance I could've so easily fallen into.
We were lining up. Good God, not again. I wanted to pray, but did God listen to prayers for such things? Last time we'd been hit so hard, and I couldn't feel my hands anymore. I looked down at them to see them bleeding. I hoped I had all my fingers and purposely counted to make sure. Was there any purpose? Why were we here? My ears burned with the last bit of warm blood before going numb. Then I heard the calls, voices cracking with the strain, and we got into position. I crouched down and saw my enemy opposite me. There he was, just like all the times before. Same watery eyes in the wind, same red face from the cold, same shaking knees from the persistent running, dodging, diving. We were all of us tired. Couldn't we stop? Couldn't we take a break and pick up where we left off?
No, I remembered. We were there for a reason. He wasn't just like me: he was wearing different colors, speaking a different language, calling out different names. He hit us hard, but we hit back. We were there to win, to beat him, to come out victorious in what seemed like a draining, fruitless battle. We were there for home, who listened for reports on the radio and waited to hear from us. They needed this as much as we did. Maybe we did it for them. It hurt, but the pain made the rest afterward more defined. I couldn't imagine the rest, but soon I wouldn't have to. Just get through this night, and I could rest.
More shouts from behind. It was coming. The moment to charge, to push, to try until my hands fell off or my knees broke. I dug my hands into the mud. I waited.
"Blue! 42! Hike!"
Clashing of helmets, deep-chested grunts of men being pounded, the sound of cleats sticking in the cold ground. I sprinted forward, cut to the right, and looked up just in time to see the spiraling ball appear out of a cloud of white snowflakes. I reached out, pulled it close to my chest, and ran. I don't remember sidestepping, stiff-arming, or juking. I don't remember crossing the line or feeling the slaps and pats and punches of victory from my teammates. I remember the feeling of the warm sheets on my aching legs and the sight of the snow falling outside. Outside, where it belonged. And never had a sleep seemed so deserved, saved for those who worked hardest to get it. I knew that it was over, that my hands would heal, that my soreness tomorrow would prove as a pleasantly-aching reminder that we had accomplished and survived and won. It was over. Until next week.

love to keep me warm

Martha Frederick looked down at the stone on her finger. The diamond sparkled in the light from the window when she wiggled her finger up and down. It reminded her of the snowflakes that still stuck on the sleeve of her jacket. They were intricate and cold and cut like chiseled ice.

"Hello, dear,” Dashel McDermott wrapped a black arm sprinkled with snow around Martha’s shoulders as he kissed the top of her head. He smelled distinctly like pine. “Have you been waiting for me long?”

Martha smiled in response as Dashel sat across the table and unwrapped the scarf from around his neck. He placed his hat on the table and draped his jacket across the back of the chair.

“Have you ordered for me?” Dashel asked, rubbing his hands together to warm them.

Martha opened her mouth to answer when the waiter brought over two bowls of potato soup and set them down in front of the couple.

Dashel looked at Martha and smiled charmingly. It was difficult for him to smile any other way. Martha used to want to kiss the dimples that formed when he smiled at her.

“I’m sorry I have to make this quick, Marty,” Dashel said, slurping a spoonful of soup “I have to get back to the lumberyard before the snow gets too deep.”

“Will you be home tonight? I have your birthday present.”

He smiled. “I like when you call it ‘home.’” He reached across the table and grasped her hand. His hand was still cold. “Listen, Marty, why can’t we get married in February? You know we have your parents’ blessing. Is that what’s keeping you back?”

Martha felt the prongs of the ring pushing into the sides of her fingers. She blinked and smiled carefully, shaking her head.

“Then let’s do it. Then I can come ‘home’ and stay home, and you won’t have to be by yourself anymore.”

His words sounded louder in her head than he said them. She’d been alone for 25 years before Dashel came, and he was the only thing keeping her from spending her evenings listening to the radio in her parents’ living room. She had loved his company at first.

“All right.” Her voice was unnaturally permissive.

“All right?” Dashel said. He squeezed her hand and smiled again, then hurriedly ate his soup.

Dashel McDermott was tall. That’s what had attracted Martha at first. Then the way he smiled at her, followed by the way her hand fit into his. He ran a lumber mill outside of town, and he didn’t shave as often as he should have. He was turning thirty the week before Christmas, and his first fiancé had walked out on him three weeks before their wedding. That was seven years ago.

Martha Frederick didn’t love Dashel any more now than she had two years ago when he had first held the door open for her to this very café. She had thought she loved the smell of his jacket and the roughness of his unshaven cheek when he kissed her. She had thought she loved the roughness of his hands and the sound of his voice saying her name. He was the only one who called her “Marty.” He was the only one who called her. He was the only one.

“I have to go,” Dashel said, rewrapping the scarf around his neck and slipping on his jacket. He stood and placed a roll of bills on the table, bending over to be eye-level with Martha. “I’ll see you tonight?”

Dear Dashel. Martha brushed his windblown hair to one side of his forehead. He kissed her soundly and stood up, glancing behind him one last time before walking out the door. Martha watched him out the window as he walked down the sidewalk covered in snow, head bowed against the wind. She looked down at her ring, still shining in the window light, but all the snowflakes on her sleeve had melted into wool-soaked puddles of water.

finals week

Terence, this is stupid stuff
(A.E. Housman)

I felt a funeral in my brain
....
My mind was going numb
(Emily Dickinson)

This picture makes my heart glad:

a wish your heart makes

I think I get more excited over the idea of things than the things themselves. I was just thinking about how much I want to own a bookstore, live in an apartment, own a cat with a literary name, read books while it's snowing outside, drive over to Mom's to bake cookies for whatever church function is happening that night....But what about the things I don't take into account? How much responsibility will it be to own my own bookstore? How much work will it take? Paying rent and bills and cleaning out the kitty litter - maybe I won't even have time to read while it snows (maybe it won't even snow!) and I'll be too tired to bake. My, imagining is fun. But that's exactly what imagining is: thinking about things that aren't real or true or haven't happened or won't happen. But I do like to think about it, even if it is unrealistic. If I didn't have these "unrealistic" dreams about my future, I would feel very much like I was wasting my time in Accounting and Small Business Management and How to Be a Grown-Up 101. (I wish that was a real class.)

Amidst the 72-degree weather here in Kentucky, it's snowing 5 inches in Wisconsin. I want very much to go home for Christmas now. I have a strong urge to read something Nathaniel Hawthorne, but maybe that's another one of those "ideas" that I won't really like once I get a hold of.

Happiness is celebrating the little things - my Dove chocolate holiday wrapper

Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day

Time is an odd thing. I don't know if you ever noticed, but it doesn't stop. Thanksgiving was already two whole weeks ago. We are in the thick of the Christmas season. Lights are strung across mall ceilings and every department store plays "Deck the Halls" behind the voices of bustling Christmas shoppers. Sales! Pushy peddlers! Did you know the Leo diamond is the most beautiful diamond in the world? Or so says the nice gentleman at LeRoy's Jewelers who was either bored or really thought I had $6700 in my red polka-dotted purse to shell out on a sparkly ring (with 6 more cuts than a regular diamond! See how it glitters in the light? Uh, not really. Do you want to try it on? No, thanks. It looks better on! The only way I am putting that ring on is if Mel Gibson is offering it to me on one knee).

Monday I walked around a housing development at 9 o'clock, the cold air filtering through the knit of my gloves. I stopped in front of a house completely covered in white icicle lights as Frank Sinatra began singing "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" on my iPod. As I watched the house, I imagined cars pulling into the driveway and parking on the street, walking up to the door in knee-length coats and red gloves, a woman opening the front door in an apron and revealing a warm world lit with candles and smelling of gingerbread. Instrumental Christmas music flowed out of the house and voices rose in greeting as desserts were presented to the hostess as a thank-you offering. And as I stood there on the sidewalk, Frank Sinatra singing, "Through the years we all will be together," I thought about the Christmases past, with youth group and church and family. How different it'll be going home to a house I've only known for 4 days and a church who forgets my name.

Time is an odd thing. I never thought Thanksgiving would come, but it has, and is passed. Christmas break seems so far away, but in two weeks I'll be home with the semester behind me. Time keeps going. Sometimes I feel like something will never come or never end, yet somehow I end up on the other side of it looking back at it, wondering how I got through it. I just can't wait to be on the other side of this semester. TWO MORE WEEKS!

Leave the sewin' to the women

I like gender roles. I like that Sally got Billy to check the oil in her car and Henry can do 90 push-ups in a minute when I can’t even bench the bar that’s supposed to hold the weights. I’m not saying that all guys have to wield machine guns and walk across shards of glass a la John McClain in Die Hard, or that all girls must subscribe to Good Housekeeping and idolize Betty Crocker. I for one am always in the mood for a football game, and did you notice that, before Cat Cora, all the Iron Chefs were male? (For once I found myself telling the woman to get out of the kitchen!)

Sometimes I just get tired of the “anything you can do I can do” frame of mind. I think people are getting so caught up in "equality" that they forget how wonderful being different really is. When I’m feeling weak and distraught, I appreciate that the guy I turn to is going to be someone strong that I lean on. Being “sensitive” doesn’t mean he has to cry when I get split ends. Stop telling guys to "get in touch with their emotions." If I wanted someone to cry with me, I'd turn to my girlfriends. I think that sometimes we look for things in the opposite sex that just aren't there, and instead of trying to put them there, let's appreciate what already is there. Instead of dragging your boyfriend to your family reunions and forcing him to watch the latest Nicholas Sparks book-turned-movie with you, appreciate that he can tighten the bolts on your bed frame and hook up the surround sound. I'll turn to my girlfriends if I want to watch a chick-flick or shop for shoes. If I can’t open the pickle jar, I have no problem calling in my brother. If there’s a huge bug on my wall with 80,000 legs and a machete, I’m not against letting my dad handle it. None of this "trying to be just as good as the guy" baloney. Being different doesn't make you lower. "Equality" doesn't mean all can do all. I just don't think genders are celebrated enough for simply being their genders.

I think God created male and female to complement one another, but how can we complement one another if we're constantly trying to be like or "as good" as the other? Be different. Enjoy the differences. Live long and prosper.