I have two cities listed on my phone’s weather app, the primary cities between which my heart will always be divided: New York and Atlanta. During months like this, when living in the Southeast affords one an early spring and living in New York affords one more winter, I check the app often to note differences. The Husband emailed yesterday with information of the same: “80 degrees in Atlanta and 40/snowing in NYC. We made the right cboice.” Yes, we did.  But we have our own outdoor issues here in the sun.

Our beautifully brown and ungrowing yard took a turn for the worse this week, bursting forth in glorious green. For two people sans experience in lawn care and landscaping (business and dental school offered shockingly little in the way of such courses), this development was bad news indeed. After a simple question put to my brother-in-law resulted in a fifteen-minute summation of the time, knowledge, and financial requirements necessary to not being The House with the Junky Yard, TH and I looked at each other and said in unison: “Let’s hire someone.” (Then I asked if this meant we would now be splitting the labor of my biweekly housecleaning frenzy. I’m still waiting for him to figure out the right answer to that question, because laughter is. Not. It.)

Our front/back yard combo is…a hair larger than my old fire escape. This feature, desirable during house-hunting (which occurred during winter), is now overwhelming. My neurotic mind imagines all the wildlife crawling around out there in our untamed forest of grass and trees. And then I remember that thing called gratitude and, armed with a folding chair and a glass of Sauvignon Blanc, I head out to our patio. My muscles tense, ready to jump as a wasp hovers nearby. I remind myself that there’s no such thing as a killer squirrel. I warm up my throwing arm in case a stray cat ventures across the fence. I will enjoy nature, dammit!

A fly lands in my wine.

I was a child who knew how to extract the sweetness from a honeysuckle blossom, who raced against sunset on her bike, who danced among fireflies. Then I grew up and moved to New York, where outside is (a) the area of transition between point A and point B, or (b) a great place to eat and drink, at a sought-after table outside an overpriced restaurant. I may have forgotten that childlike appreciation of nature. As I fidget in my folding chair and the wasp inches closer, I realize how hard it is for me to just sit still out here, reading my book on gratitude. To just be here within the beauty, to even see it as beauty. My lens needs washing, because all I see is a yard full of work (for someone else) and money spent (for us).

I read more on gratitude, washing my own lens.

A few minutes later I look up and see it. The garden planted by the previous owner’s daughter is overgrown and chaotic, but there is a splash of pink amidst the disarray. I walk up to the picket fence and stare. A dozen blushing blooms greet me, who did nothing to put them there. All the work wrought by another’s hands, the hours of planting and waiting and hoping and pruning, my free gift. TH gets home and walks out to meet me and I show him the flowers. A few minutes later, our seventy-something retired neighbor–the one who mows his yard in a World’s Best Grandpa t-shirt as we watch our grass grow, shame-faced, from our window–walks up to our shared fence with his wife. He compliments our yard and we laugh, then realize he’s serious.

“So much potential,” he says. And I realize how clean a lens can be, to see right through the mess and into the future.

I ask him what the pink bloom is, recognizing the red roses climbing trellises in his yard. “Camellia,” he offers, with some information about their blooming schedule and care. He points out a rhododendron bush as TH and I nod, not really understanding this strange new language. “And that,” he concludes, “is a little cedar tree. About the only good thing you can say about it is that it can survive a drought!”

A memory flashes across my mind’s screen: a time a few years ago when I kept running across, and fixating on, biblical mentions of trees. They’re everywhere in those pages, if you want to know–palm, fig, acacia. Cedars are a favorite, valued for their resistance to insects, their height, and their lifespan. They were used to build the temple in Jerusalem. And we have a tiny one in our yard.

It will take learning and time for me to enter the phase of Full Yard Appreciation. The other day, TH pointed to some purple dots in the front yard and said, “Look! We have flowers!” Without missing a beat, I replied, “Those are weeds,” and watched his face drop. After assuring him that they could be flowers if he wanted them to be (and therefore remain unpulled), I headed to my gratitude journal and wrote, “a husband who looks at a weed and sees a flower.”

All too often I walk about with my head lowered, pointing out life’s weeds. But–my weed-averse husband, knowing my love of cherry blossom trees, has grown adept at pointing them out and watching me simultaneously squeal with delight and grab my phone to take a picture. The deepest and truest part of me always comes back to the tree, how time began to fall apart at the foot of one and how all our restoration was completed on one.

I may still be learning this outdoor business, but I know when to look up and see the trees.

One of my recently developed hobbies is to DVR travel shows.  (Does pressing a button and sitting on a couch constitute a hobby?  I say yes!) Samantha Brown on the Travel Channel stars in some of my favorites (Passport to Europe, Great Hotels), and I watch her narrate her adventures whenever The Husband isn’t around, because he can’t stand her.  (He finds her voice annoying and hates the way she meanders away from the camera after making a cheesy comment.  He is right, but the difference is that I can see past these qualities and he can’t.  I know.  I can’t help it, I’m just so tolerant.)  Imagine my surprise the other day when I played her episode on Honduras and watched as she explored a tiny town called Copan Ruinas, a village I visited as part of a dental outreach trip three years ago with NYU (travel opportunities and free coffee were the two perks of working there. The salary was not).

I stared at Sam (nicknames–we’re cool like that) and ignored her dorkiness as she wandered around the cobblestone streets of the village where our group lived for a week–streets we strode across with purpose in the mornings to fix teeth then stumbled upon with buzzes at night to head home after drinks at El Sapo Rojo. Then she headed to the ruins ten minutes away, which we had also visited, our heads pounding from one too many of the prior night’s Uterus shots (don’t ask). What I remember from my visit there is hearing, in between waves of nausea and sips of Powerade, that the archaeologists’ job is defined by exposing, not rebuilding.  Buried underneath layers of earth and centuries of progress are temples and cities, perfectly preserved by nature and waiting to be revealed by the most careful of hands.  You know where I’m going with this, right?

Sam’s tour guide had a few more degrees than ours did, and he spoke of the only two to three feet worth of progress made in one direction each day, the seeming interminability and tediousness of it all.  Then he brought her to the base of one of the largest temples on the site, and they looked up to behold three stories of ancient grandeur.  Further discussion with the guide revealed the ever-present impetus behind such labor: the excavators, mostly from the area like himself, are driven by a pride in their history and in the revealing of their magnificent heritage.

Naturally, I bundled up all this information and swung it back to my own narrative.  When I moved to New York, I wanted to build a New Me.  Demolish the old mess and start from the ground up on something more…impressive. Within a few months of my being there, I realized that in a city packed to the shore’s edge with people and buildings, there’s not a lot of room for new construction.  But the grit and grime of the city is an excellent exfoliant, and as I lived out my transferred existence I watched the layers of falseness that I had wrapped myself in over the years fall away after a good scrubbing.  All of the effort it had taken to be Not Me was released, too–my new lightness was due to more than just hours of walking.

And so in the aftermath of my own archaeological period, I build another new life with the one who was there for my New York Me revealing.  I don’t have the city  to hold me accountable to authenticity, but I do have him.  And I have the one who engineered the whole thing, who was too full of love to let me continue reading lines from a play I wrote; too full of purpose to let my short-sighted plan stand.  I realize now that working to have it all together, even maintaining that appearance of order, is actually chaos.  Decay waiting to happen, earth waiting to crumble. But this life–the falling down, the breaking open, the journey 1000 miles north and 850 miles south, the always heartache followed by happily ever after, the wiping of counters and scrubbing of toilets–this is not a life having it all together, it is a life together. With him, with all of you, and most of all, with Him. Because when I put pen to paper now, it is not to draw a map of the future but to transcribe my narrative now.  I am learning, in this season of gratitude that I hope never ends, to see the ways He works in this world, to recognize that every time I watch counter-intuitiveness trump predictability, He is in it; every time I witness paradox proclaim truth, He is there; every moment I am involved in making this world a little less cluttered with my mess–my ingratitude, my need to control–I am, with Him, ushering in His kingdom on earth.  Redemption discards my performing as it shows up in my incapability, embracing the Master’s excavation of who I was made to be.

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My life in New York was many things, but most of all it was a story.  And as I’m writing that story, I remember beyond the romance and the friendships to an especially difficult part: my steady financial decline throughout five years there.  I remember getting my first paycheck, seeing how much was taken out for taxes, considering how much I was paying for rent, and realizing, This will just not do. So I found a friend who was looking to move and we became roommates a little further downtown in a much smaller space.  My new apartment had no view of the Chrysler Building or the East River, but it was a thousand dollars less a month for me, and there was a perfectly good subway to take me to Central Park whenever I wanted.  I was back on solid ground.

Then I wasn’t.  When my first tax season in New York hit, it hit hard.  All of a sudden I found myself having to question and defend my reasons for being there, and if they were worth the cost.  Because, there in front of me in black and white and with IRS stamped on it, was the official bill that the city was charging me for life upon its island paradise.  And that bill was STEEP.

I called the Dad crying, I found a friend-recommended accountant, I prayed.  And somehow (hmm…wonder how that could be?) I made it through April 15th, year after year.  But only by the skin of my teeth, as I found myself–a letters-behind-my-name, higher-educated professional–budgeting for gum and toilet paper. New York giveth, and New York taketh away, but that balance remained in the positive column as I found friendship, love, and faith surrounding me daily.  I grabbed my bottle of Trader Joe’s Two Buck Chuck, threw down my towel, and sat on my fire escape as the world walked by my window.  And I was happy.

But that’s me, a white upper-middle-class female who has never faced the threat of homelessness or had to choose between paying the bills or eating.  I knew that, with all the financial difficulty life in New York presented, I was choosing it for myself and could ease the strain whenever I wanted by simply leaving.  I was poor, but only by Manhattan standards.  Maybe I sat in the rear balcony for Broadway shows, but I still saw them.

And then when the BF proposed becoming The Husband and we said those vows, he did it with the understanding that not only was he gaining no dowry, but he was actually acquiring debt when he took me on.  I owed the Dad some bank for his sponsorship of my New York Assistance Program, and I had spent six years in those hallowed academic halls racking up student loan debt to go along with post-name letters.  So he said I do to sickness, health, and the opposite of wealth that day on the beach.  Good thing his debt was less than mine and his savings greater, because last year we shelled out for our share of the American dream: two cars, a house, rooms (to go) full of furniture, a Georgia dental license, a honeymoon, a down payment (literally, and on our future).  When he opened our tax paperwork a couple of weeks ago, I saw the calculations whirring around his head before he asked it: Where did all our money go? But he knew, and I knew: we were standing in it, were surrounded by it.  In a year, we had gone from an engaged New York couple with two banking accounts, one anemic and one healthy, to a married suburban couple with a joint account that had been left ravaged and gasping for air.

The Sis quoted Ingrid Bergman to me the other day: “Success is getting what you want; happiness is wanting what you get.”  It made me think of how much of my life was spent heading for something, a race to a finish line.  How after all those years, I finally reached that self-constructed endpoint and was left wondering what life was supposed to look like beyond it.  When so many of the big questions have been answered, we are left sitting on our sectionals in our living rooms and driving around in our cars listening to XM radio as life goes on, stability replacing drama and routine replacing angst.  Each generation amasses more stuff than the one before it, counting vacation homes instead of rationing sugar.  We are overeducated, overfed, over-stimulated, over-blessed.  And we still look around and wonder what more there is.

I know what it’s like to go from thinking that God is good because of all you have, to knowing he is good because he is all you have. To hit every rock bottom there is–emotional, financial, spiritual–and be lifted back up by a faithfulness that includes and exceeds all forms of practicality and imagination.  It wouldn’t be fair, or nice, to wish that kind of descent on anyone else, but what I do hope for is that regardless of the road we each take, it is a path beyond our efforts to keep control and bigger than our prior planning would allow.  Accompanied by a faith that knows the one outside ourselves not as ATM or executive assistant, but as everything.

After the honeymoon, I drove to Wells Fargo (nee Wachovia) and closed my account, receiving for my efforts a sad little check that I deposited into our new joint account across the street at B of A.  Five years, plus the twenty-eight before it, on a sheet of paper to be combined with what he had saved.  All of him, plus all of me.  It may not have looked like much–but it was everything.

Februarys are rough.  I remember my first one in New York, back in 2006.  I was walking home from the subway after work and felt a weight of sadness that I couldn’t explain.  Sure, I was broke and perpetually single, but I was living in Manhattan!  I was happy!  And I’ve never been given to the downward swings of depression (just irrational anger and defensiveness).  Where is this coming from? I thought as the frigid air surrounded me on the pitch-dark-at-five-o’clock streets.

Soon after, I read more about the aptly named and now relevant-to-me Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) and wished I had money for a trip to a tropical island, or a heat lamp.  But just knowing the cause of my emotional heaviness made it slightly lighter, and I forged ahead into February with an uplifted heart.  Then I remembered that Valentine’s Day was right around the corner.  Sigh.

Earlier this week I felt that familiar winter disillusion.  I woke up and looked out the window and everything was wet and gray.  Gone was the white novelty of snow, replaced by cold rain.  On days like these, spring feels further away than a reason to celebrate Valentine’s Day did to me back in 2006–far enough for me to answer Shelley’s “if winter comes, can spring be far behind?” with, “Hell yes it can, Percy.  You and that groundhog don’t know shit.”

That’s where I was a few days ago, cursing dead poets and helpless animals, and so I decided to pray.  It went a little something like this:  I feel dead inside.  I know it’s based on weather and not truth, but it feels like the most real thing in my heart.  I want it out.  I need…to be inspired.  I want to feel alive.

Yes, Jesus hears even melodramatic prayers.  I climbed into the car and headed out of the neighborhood for a most decidedly uninspiring yearly doctor’s appointment, my bag of emotional weariness on the passenger seat beside me.  Then the music came on.

Looking back you know
You had to bring me through
All that I was so afraid of
Though I questioned the sky now I see why
Had to walk the rocks to see the mountain view
Looking back I see the lead of love

That was all it took, really–and why not?  What better place for God to show up than in music?  I put Caedmon’s Call on repeat and, yes, shed a few tears at the commonality of all biographies that don’t share you or me as the author, and are therefore personalized by love beyond measure.  Stories that matter not because of what my hands reach for, but for the hands that reach me.  Tales that include an inspiration not scratched and clawed at, but freely given.

I love my story.

I have forsaken the South in many ways over the years: refusing to wave at every person I pass on the street (The Husband has taken that mantle up for me and he’s not even Southern–oh for shame!), moving to New York, not making Junior League membership a top priority.  And loving winter, at least until February comes and I want to kill it.  But until then, I love cozy sweaters and stylish outerwear and snazzy boots.  I love visible breath and wood-burning fireplaces and packed snow.  I also love the orange leaves of fall and the first green of spring.  I love the seasons, all four, because there is something so necessary about each of them; something so natural and orderly and renewing about marking the passing of time with birth and death and life again.  And I have to remember all that when Shelley’s spring feels unreachably buried beneath Doppler forecasts swathed in green.  I have to remember that the seasons are as faithful in changing as the one who made them is in not.

But I don’t have to do the remembering all by myself.  He sends plenty of reminders–some set to music, some not.  Reminders in the form of a warm, dry restaurant and a table surrounded by people who have known me since college and are pouring sangria.  Reminders in the form of Post-It Notes from The Husband.  Reminders in the Much More to life that I happen to believe in and rest my soul upon.

I left the doctor’s office the other day and headed to my car in the parking deck.  To my left, I noticed a bank of ice left over from last month’s snowstorm, hidden in shade and clinging to life despite multiple rains and last weekend’s seventy degrees.  There are places in me like that, where light and life and truth take extra-long to reach–but they always get there.

Last Thursday, I drove over to our still-unoccupied but frenetically worked-upon house to meet The Husband and try out new paint samples that did not belong in the Baby Crap family of hues.  I arrived before he did (shocker) and pulled up in the driveway, keeping the car on because that’s how you keep the seat warmers on, and my butt had requested them.  Waiting there in the quiet of the front seat and descending nightfall, I had A Moment.

I thought about this season three years ago, when I was gearing up for a visit from The Mom and Dad and a Christmas-day train ride to Jersey to meet the Yankee fam.  I needed a little help feeling merry that year because I had just taken a risk that seemed to have failed spectacularly; in fact, I was reeling after a kind rejection from the guy I thought could be The One and the paired potential loss of one of my favorite friendships. I had never felt so enmeshed in my single status or so far from the possibility of true love.  I began to think that I would always be the fifth or seventh or ninth wheel at family holiday gatherings, the only unpaired person at the dinner table besides the lovable uncle whose marriage record rivals that of Henry VIII.

And now here I was, staring at the home where I will live with The One, a designation about which I happened to be correct if early.  I marveled at all the Chapter Ones I have mistaken for epilogues, all the wasted hopelessness, and even at how a thirty-year fixed mortgage, assload of debt, and abandonment of the city where I came to life can look like freedom.  Finally.

Pre-NYC, I was unaccustomed to practicing what I preached.  I kept my faith at arm’s-length and my plans buried in a mattress safe from the God I claimed to trust but whose intentions I secretly doubted.  After all, he kept messing around with those plans.  But then I was removed from my home and myself enough to see all I had counted out just because I didn’t understand what love could really look like.  And it clicked that there was a safer place for my treasure, so I packed it up and sent it north.  And so went my heart.

I remember when the venerable Jesse Ventura claimed that religion is a crutch for the weak, and I remember how angry I was at his insolence (and under cover of that anger, frightened that he was right).  I remember when I woke up to the fact that religion could not only be a crutch, but a weapon.  And I remember when it hit me that I was never meant for religion, but for grace–not a crutch, but the very air I need to breathe every moment.  I think of all the time I spent growing up in church, exhaustedly repeating hymns whose words bypassed my heart and flew over my head as I wondered when I could get back to my real life.  And now, what worship looks like: acknowledging that the bottom line is no longer Me but all that has been done on my behalf, acts of grace so huge and eternal that all I can do is humbly accept them and respond with voice and head lifted up; a posture which, uncoincidentally, is when I am most myself.  An act of response, not compulsion, to a love so full that it goes beyond the realms of simple comfort and trite encouragement and feel-good sentimentalism and rounds the corner into transformation.  So far beyond what I ever knew.  Such deep, pure rest. Such everything.

In a few days, our address will no longer have a Line 2.  The furniture we have sat on for the past two years will be relegated to basement-quality.  We are entering a state of permanence unrivaled since I left The Mom and Dad’s place fifteen years ago.  We’ll make a home there even as our ultimate home and treasure lie elsewhere, safely stowed with the only One able to keep it.