Curiosity

In just a few hours now, Ken will arrive.

It will be starting to get dark because the sun will have officially slid behind the treeline. But the horizon will keep shouting the colours and light, as if from off stage, and that shouting will call him home to our dock.

He'll be alone, and that will be good.

A few days ago that didn't feel good, because that's when I found out that our son and his family wouldn't be joining us for the weekend afterall. And I cried a little that day. Grammas do that.

But by now I've accepted and even welcomed the extra days alone, just the two of us, as a gift, fully aware that it's the kind of gift this marriage can eagerly receive, given what it's contended with these past several years.

So.

I wait for the arrival of not just the boat, and not just my husband, but of the last curious threads of the tapestry that God's been crafting from my cottage stay this year.

And I'm so grateful. And I'm curious.

Grateful because this year, unlike so many before it, I did NOT arrive in a state of exhaustion. Not at all. It was amazing, giddy even, to begin my time with a calm and happy spirit, instead of the grumpy and/or numb self I usually bring to my first days here. What a gift to let the filling of quiet, rest and solitude pour into already existing reserves; to accept from God the lavish experience of fullness from the beginning.

Grateful because this was an all out summer, at least up to this point. I have barely been inside for five weeks now! The consistent early morning breath-snatching stillness has been unprecedented. So many mornings of unhurried time with my Bible and my journal, just me and my tea....and the beavers! Or the loon. Or the chipmunks, if they too got off to an early start.

Sunsets, likewise. Down by the water, rehearsing with Jesus all the thoughts, and ponderings of my day, of my life. Remembering again who I am, while the Shekinah proves too much to look at, but I can't help myself.

Grateful for the time Kristyn and her beyond resilient family could be here, and how the joy lingered when Abby could stay. Even though there were more Gramma tears when she left. (Truth be told, she had to leave to give the frog population a reprieve.)

Grateful for the prolonged permission to indulge in the rhythms and order in which my soul comes alive, and is most at peace, no other schedules to compete with the rituals of every day. Just being free to pace the day.

Grateful for the honour to be allowed the joyful work of study and preparing for the fall, the glorious uninterruptedness of it, the thoroughness of it.

So.

Grateful. And curious.

Because God, through the generosity of my astonishing community of faith, has still provided me with one more week. And He seems to have gone out of His way to protect it for just Ken and me. So I'm wondering, what that might mean; what 8 more days of this perfection might have hidden in it.

Open my eyes
My ears

Let me feel You on my skin
Glorious and warm and golden

I am all Yours, still
These last important, curious days.
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