We sang the song, it seemed like, almost weekly. “Trust and Obey/ for there’s no other way/ to be happy in Jesus/ but to Trust and Obey . . . .” A go-to for small-town worshipers on Wednesday nights at the Church of Christ.   A song regulars could sing without the assistance of a hymnal, though there was always a reminder. “Turn next to #915.” We sang it so often we forgot to hear the words. 

Trust and Obey. The directives come hitched like a trailer to a truck, though it’s hard to say which is doing the pulling and which is being pulled. They’re not the same and yet one rarely makes a showing without the other in tow. 

Back in the day, when the rule book was fat and the list of “shall nots” for college programs was long, we were allowed to give our scout team fellas nothing. Cool University of Oklahoma swag? No way. Gear for daily practice, perhaps shorts with an interlocking OU and a pair of Nike shoes? Nope. “Extra benefit,” the University’s compliance officer would chide with an I-mean-business face.

“That doesn’t even make sense,” we would argue. “What’s the original benefit the extra would be on top of?” 

“She just kept not dying.” That’s what the doctors said to Katherine Wolf’s family after a sixteen-hour surgery in which they replaced her full blood volume five times. She was a twenty-six--year-old brand new mom living her best life when a birth defect she didn’t know she had caused a rupture in the base of her brain.  It doesn’t make sense that she lived through it. “Nothing on paper does,” make sense that is, she says. Yet, when you hear her tell her story a lot of wavy things start to straighten out.

We were talking, a small circle of us, at a New Year’s Eve brunch. The kind of get-together where you get together wearing lululemon tights and ball caps and the front door with the “Welcome” wreath never closes but instead stands open like a handwritten permission slip. Our conversation turned to loss.

“It’s weird, isn’t it?” someone said, “How every Christmas seems to bring a tragedy...” 

As the blank slate of January 1 approaches, our minds as if on auto-pilot shift to lists… An excerpt from “The Compost File:”

I’m not much of a New Year’s resolutions girl, but I do love lists. They erect borders around slippery things I’m afraid might slide away if I don’t step in and do my part to contain them. The ones in the notes on my phone, while a decent substitute when I’m on the go, don’t hold a candle to the real ones I make on the backs of envelopes—the ones that sometimes get re-written just so they can get checked off. Those carry gravitas in their etching.

That’s how stuff gets done.

Austyn sat up in bed organizing her lovies who were joining us for the night. Turtle-Turtle, Rocky Bear, Dumbo, Puff-Puff and her newest acquisitions from an extended-family gift exchange—Katty and Dog. They were neatly lined up on and around the pillows forming a retaining wall on the far side of the bed. “You hafta be good,” she whispered to them. “Santa is seeing who’s nice and naughty and he’s coming in his sleighhhhhhh!” the last word taking off like a team of reindeer from the roof, its one syllable stretched to capacity inside of her whisper-shriek. I was laying with my back to her, feigning sleep while cataloging every single word as the Times Square Ticker in my head ran ‘round and ‘round exclaiming, “This is as good as it gets!”

My four-year-old granddaughter thinks Santa and Jesus are next of kin. 

I can so see how she got there. 

Both Old St. Nick and the Prince of Peace watch over everything everywhere all at once. Each disapproves of bad behavior. We petition both with lists of wants and needs. Legions of helpers—elves and angels, respectively—rally to help them make miracles occur...

Austyn, who has grown into a pre-school-going girl, is a believer. Even if some of her wires are crossed. The fibers that cement Jesus of Nazareth and Santa of the North Pole together in her mind will, in time, loosen and begin to separate. But I am not inclined to push the process. 

Her conviction—however it’s bundled—fortifies me.

“Clear the court and let’s play points!” instructs my hitting coach. We always start with FBI. Not the bureau, but the “first ball in” -- a way to get free reps of the serve before scorekeeping begins.

I stuff one used yellow ball under the leg of my Lycra shorts and bounce another with my left hand.

As a girl who loves the grind of a drill, I do not dread the first half of our practice.  “Three deep cross-court forehands then one winner down the line” is the manifestation of Churchill’s “man who grins when he fights” for me. The over and over and over again seduces and sedates. I’m happiest when straining to build necessary ruts. 

But the last half of practice, playing points, is my favorite part.

She was a wife, a mother, a grandmother, a sister, a daughter, a friend. 

A teacher for decades.

A lifelong warrior for the not-quite-yets, Freeda Richardson’s classroom was a haven. Students found their way there for the jar of peanut butter and the box of saltine crackers she put on the table every day at lunch (a practice that gave those with no set place to go a place to be.) But they came for a hundred other reasons, too. Like mostly how she made them feel. Teenagers wandered in and hung out. Word got around: Mrs. Richardson was kind. 

During the most chaotic spans of my life, I’ve kept a gratitude journal.  When my kids were little and I was building a college basketball program, I kept one religiously. It was my calibrator. Daily, it seemed, an avalanche of things that either came out of left field or simply did not go as planned would pile into the sanctuary of my mind. When I closed my eyes at night, my brain would re-count them as if at confession. While tons of good stuff obviously happened, too, it didn’t naturally land in pews of prominence.  So I had to put it there. 

Sara Ban Breathnach’s Simple Abundance Gratitude Journal was my prompt. 

Hiking presents a conundrum for me. I can never decide what to do with my eyes. If I look up and around at the grandeur—which is, in fact, why I love to tromp around in nature in the first place—I am bound to trip or roll an ankle or end up three-feet deep in mud.  But if I look down to ensure I’m putting my foot where I need to put it, I miss what I came to see. So I look up and out, then down. Up and out, then down. Up and out, then down. Constantly wondering if I should be doing the other while I’m doing the one.

I never get it right. 

The white clapboard house with two front doors had an OPEN sign taped in the window.  Our phone’s GPS had directed us via the walker’s route to the vintage Vermont structure masquerading as a UPS shipping center about 2.9 miles west on Main Street, just past the Dandy Doggie Groomer and across the street from the furniture mart.  Walking parallel to the river alongside the busy road, we made the picturesque trek, motoring briskly--both to get there on a Saturday before it closed at 2:00 pm and to keep step with the anxiety that had ballooned around the misplaced package of medical supplies my friend and travel buddy had to have.

Crossing the natural spillway where the lower lake pauses before reaching the brink of its fall (a decision I made to avoid an additional forty-five minutes of hiking in the freezing mist that had moved in), I carefully plotted my route, rock by rock in real time. The first few steps felt daring, like an adventurous Twister game without the plastic mat of brightly colored dots. I was a kid again, riding my bike along the top of a three-foot tall by one-foot-wide concrete barrier wall that surrounded my elementary school. Fear of falling wasn’t a factor. I was footloose and fancy free. 

Testing half-submerged rocks for stability, I moved steadily though not quickly across the top of the icy water. 

I chose landing pads, locked in on targets, solved problems before they became them. I tightened my core and deepened my breath. I was a ninja defying frigid peril, measured step by measured step by measured step.

Then I looked up to check my progress and panic swallowed me like the whale that devoured Jonah.

Suddenly, I knew not what to do.

In the HBO limited series, “Task,” an intense tale of cops (in the form of a small special ops FBI team) and robbers (in the form of a drug trafficking motorcycle gang), Mark Ruffalo plays Tom Brandis, a last-leg federal agent who is running in place inside of himself. When we meet him, Brandis is working a recruiting desk for the FBI at a career fair while waiting for the sentencing of his adopted mentally ill son who is in prison for killing his mother, Brandis’ wife. 

The weight of love that looks and feels like anything and everything but is pulling him under. 

Some of the most necessary ingredients for a thriving society seem to be a bit scarce right now. Cantankerous human knots are everywhere we look . . .it’s hard sometimes to imagine a way to unravel it all. No matter the complexity of the problem (or the problem(s)), however, kindness never hurts. 

The following is an excerpt from my book The Compost File released earlier this year.

A biologist friend of mine says that when we ooh and ahh at the rapturous explosion of fall foliage, what we’re really doing is clamoring about watching trees pee and poop. My granddaughter would say, “That’s bathroom talk.”  And she wouldn’t be wrong, but neither would he.

Once a year—every year-- before dropping, leaves collect the garbage. All the stuff that a tree can’t use gets channeled to its appendages into a sort of trash can to be dumped when the time and temperature are right. It’s a shedding process called abscission. Leaves hoard the crap, a layer of cells seals it off at the base, and when the leaf falls, it takes the excrement with it.  Detox with a vibrant, kaleidoscope glow.

It's the natural order of things—healthy, glorious, graphic, necessary.  A ridding to make room for regeneration.

An irritant shows up that an oyster can’t get rid of.  That’s how one in every 10,000 of these sea creatures creates a pearl. 

When parasites or random types of organic matter get lodged between the mollusk’s mantle and its shell, an oyster’s defense mechanism ratchets up and surrounds the invader with layer upon layer of a substance known as nacre. Over years, these sacred layered secretions create a pearl.

But only if the water is just right.   

In 1995, a standard horse trailer pulled into Yellowstone National Park and dumped eight grey wolves out into the wild. The wolves’ job was to recalibrate the ecosystem of one of our country’s most prized parcels of real estate that had been severely damaged seventy years earlier by the purposeful eradication of this natural predator. What happened next was a bunch of very bad things.  

“GG, what does ‘galore’ mean?” my granddaughter asks as I read the rhyming stanzas of Designed by God so I must be Special, a book I bought to share with her daddy almost thirty years ago.

“It means ‘lavish,’” I tell her. 

She cuts her eyes and squishes her nose, “What’s lavish??”

“Like lots and lots and lots.”  

She nods her head as if to say, “I got you.” So I read on.  

My friend’s son played well at quarterback in his first collegiate game. The offense he led moved the ball up and down the field as he guided his team to a twenty-point victory. He barked orders. He scrambled. He threw a spiral to his wide-out on an old school post-and-go. 

When the game ended, my friend couldn’t wait to greet his boy with a celebratory hug.

“Great game, buddy! he gushed as he hugged his sweaty son with eye-black stains across his cheeks. Then with emphasis he added, “How fun was that?!” 

The youngster bowed his head avoiding eye contact, and muttered, “Thanks.  I can’t believe I fumbled in the middle of that long drive.”

“Wait, what? Son, you know there’s no such thing as a perfect game.”

“Well, that was far from perfect, dad.”