My life is a crazy quilt, half-sewn

I know--it's been an entire month.  I'll have to catch everyone up on our adventures as they have been many and rich.  This post is just a little something I wrote on the plane back to the US when I couldn't sleep.  Forgive the rambling and the misspellings (though I'll try to edit them here.)

Let me describe this moment.  I am in seat 74D on a 747 somewhere just past the international date line.  I’m 5 hours off Sydney coast and 9 hours from Dallas where local time is approximately 4am.  I have watched a move,  several TV episodes, eaten a three course meal from tiny, metal boxes, and since I have been awake for over 24 hours, I should be sleeping like Superhusband beside me.

But these luscious little thoughts keep tempting me, chasing me, needling my typing fingers.  I am awash with what was, is, and will be.  I will write until my precariously perched laptop runs out of reserve battery power and possibly by then will have had enough catharsis to put me to bed for a while.  Speaking of going to bed, my lovely mother in law, who I just left in the Perth airport, dressed to the nines at 4:00 in the morning to drop us off, has a particular way of saying that it’s time to sleep.  “It’s sleepy bobo time!” she coos. Often it’s shortened and asked of others; “Off to bobos, then?” I don’t know what “bobo” is supposed to mean in this instance, but the fact that it’s a weird little Lancastrian term, reminiscent of some of the Southernisms of my family is distinctly comforting.

I am wearing grey dress pants because they are the most comfortable, stretchy pants I have that are fit to be seen in public.  I have delicately coupled this with a purple t-shirt I bought years ago at a thrift store.  The left side of the neckline refuses to cover my bra strap a la Naomi on Mamma’s Family, and the front middle waistline area has a constellation of little holes just about  the belly button.  These were either caused by my mother’s dryer which has little fangs that grab clothing during the cycle and gnaw them, or from giant Australian outback moths munching on my clothes while we caravanned.  (I digress a moment about the moths.  They do not only have a large wing span, but they are round, juicy creatures.  Like Hindenburgs of the insect world.  I was in a caravan park ablution block in Cervantes when one got stuck flapping around in the sink next to mine as I washed my hands.  It sounded exactly like the noise that would occur if you were to play racquetball in a barrel with a lump of baby mozzarella cheese. Do not underestimate the moth theory.) I am also wearing knee-high black socks, like a dork.  But at least now my feet won’t look like summer sausage when I get off this plane.  We’re flying into Dallas, after all, and it’s very important that none of me looks like breakfast meat. Top off this ensemble with some (again) second-hand brown, fake-fur-lined Sketchers sneaks with paint splatter on them, and you’ve almost got the picture.

I say almost, because while my body is weary and suspectly dressed, my mind feels more fecund than it has in months.  I am headed home to the US, and that has something to do with it—the prospect of hugging my mother brought tears to my eyes in the boarding cue today. But more than that, I have been granted by heaven some distance both from the ground I walked on and the ground I’ve covered.  I feel as though I’m seeing my timeline from a slightly raised platform—even if that platform IS a plane whose population is likely greater than some of the towns I’ve just driven through.  And let me just say: Babies on a plane.  What a concept.

But I am breathing freer in this high altitude.  I see my life stretch out like a crazy quilt in all colors and all directions. I am glorying in the accomplishments Superhusband and I have had, and dreaming of the ones we’ll conquer next.  Since my last entry, we have travelled over 1,000kms of wild, flat, Western Australian soil.  We visited Kalbarri gorges (which were far less disappointing than the pizza of the first night there, if you didn’t count the flies.) We visited the only monastic community in Western Australia and learned about monks and conversions in the 1900s.  We drove SO far out into nothingness to the Hutt River Principality, an “Independent Sovereign State” about 200kms from Perth which boasts (besides holding the distinction of seceding from Australia through a governmental loophole over wheat quotas in the 1970s) its own stamps, minted coins, and a royal couple named Leonard and Shirley.  If you see me during this visit to the USA, ask me and I will produce the postcards as proof.  You should look it up, and raise a glass to some good ‘ole boys with really good lawyers. We have FINALLY, after five solid months of silence, been approved to complete interview paperwork  with the US consulate in Sydney—just four days before heading back to the US because MY visa ran out.  We have climbed and photographed Wave Rock, which, as you might guess, looks exactly like an enormous ocean wave carved into a bluff.  We haven’t just lived in Western Australia, we have gallivanted in it. We have expanded into our existence and become more formidable people.

I read (on another lovely blog recently) that the woman of Proverbs 31 could “laugh at the days to come” because she was secure in God’s estimation of herself. I like that—it resonates.  But I hope when I laugh at my days to come, it’s not only about the security but the hilarity of the combinations of things and people and sights and projects we tackle.  I want see the incongruity, the asymmetry, the glorious heterogeneous abundance of my life and cackle. I want to live in a house with a red door.  I want to have children who can claim three continents as their flesh and blood. I want to be a part of a world of artists and Christians and baristas and musicians and small-town-community-theatre enthusiasts. I want to (this very weekend) sing in the midst of a great, human pipe organ of my relatives in honest a capella that makes rafters quiver.  I want to serve Thai curries and southern biscuits on the same table, both made with hands which dust themselves on the apron my mother made from her mother’s fabric. I want to fold and unfurl my crazy quilt life in all configurations so that all the colors get to meet. And when I’m done here, I want to fly to my Maker leaving a sparkling detritus of lives touched, tears shed, hands held, shoulders leant upon, and laugh lines earned. And I now renew my conviction to thank that Maker every single day for the fabrics He’s lent me to stitch on.