brimming with blue.

Listening to: Carrying Your Love With Me by George Strait

Lyric love: Some dreams stay with you forever, 

drag you around and bring you back to where you were. 

Some dreams keep on getting better, 

gotta keep believing if you wanna know for sure. {Even If It Breaks Your Heart by Eli Young Band}

Quote love: "Courage is not a man with a gun in his hand. It's knowing you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do." -Atticus Finch {To Kill a Mockingbird}

Have you ever noticed that time covers things up? It's slow sometimes, but it does; like a rug pulled over a scrape on the new hardwood floor.

This afternoon, my dad and I were waiting in a parking lot facing the highway. An empty lot was laid out across the road, with weeds spiraling up from the ground like miniature fireworks. The sun and wind curled around the occasional cactus, waving the tall grass.

It had never been used, it seemed like. I was staring at it, zoned out in admiration of how an empty lot could still seem nice in that sunny, small town kind of way.

"You know there used to be a restaurant in that lot over there?"

Um, no...

"Yeah, it closed down years ago, when you were little."

It just made me think about how landmarks can die. I mean, I didn't know that there was a building there until someone mentioned it. And after a while, people will stop talking about it, and the kids will never hear about it. And some generations later, a scant few will know about the tiny building that sold fried chicken.

The business went south, the building was demolished. And the grass grew back, cactus prickled and grew, and the cars kept rolling by.

But there's a Dairy Queen next door, so it all evens out.

Oh, yeah. You need to listen to them. ^

I love their music. It has this raw, tragic sentiment that puts one in the mind of wood-framed houses, open windows, old riddles, and summer in the late 1800s. Nostalgia, I suppose. I listened to their music on repeat until my mind was crowded with inspiration. It was weird. I ended up drawing, which finished pretty well.

Gnarled oak trees with swings,
gravel roads,
aged fences,
a winding muddy river
&
sweltering afternoons.

Kindly ignore the grainy-ness...

I looked outside earlier and saw a sunset. There were clouds brimming with blue riding the southern wind, and they moved toward the old sun as if to tuck it in as it slept. I saw it through the window, and I walked calmly ran through the yard to the road.

Because even though it's millions of miles away, knowing you're a little bit closer makes you feel like you've got just a mile to go.

I was taking pictures with my phone but the lighting wasn't right*. So I resorted to snapping pictures of the fence post I was leaning against. I watched it until a cloud covered it momentarily. The rays sent the very last sparks into the eventide, like all the last words one would say in a voicemail if their plane fell from the sky. When the distant oaks growing on the horizon looked like they were on fire, and only a tiny speck of the sun was still here, I walked back home to the company of the bulldog.

 -Jessie Suzanne


*It's a distressing moment when you remember your camera's batteries are dead. Extraordinarily distressing.

the hole in the sky.

Listening to: Come Thou Fount by Stephanie Immordino

Quote love: "I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night." -Galileo Galilei

This life is a lovely place, but it's tiring sometimes. So tonight, clad in an old shirt and worn out jeans, I ran outside and dove on the hood of my dad's pickup truck. It's the best place to be, if one wants to see something vast. Looking at the sky, I feel like everything is like it should be. Tonight was quiet. Quiet enough so I could hear my thoughts. The needles of the pine trees rubbed themselves together, sounding like an innumerable audience applauding the Creator. Silence is loud, you know.

I think we sometimes forget what this world was. This earth is like a canvas that people have painted over. And painted, and painted, and painted. And then after a while, we got used to seeing these unnatural shades of life: roads scribbling across the countryside, and buildings that scrape the clouds off the sky. We forgot the beauty of a world untouched by people.

But then, sometimes, there's a person who has a vague memory of the unstained canvas. Or maybe they saw it by accident, and that made them remember. And they look up at the speckled sky. And they see a place so deep that no amount of paint can conceal it.

The sky is lovely. It's the place where everything looks like it used to be.

God is everywhere, but sometimes this world seems so crowded that it's hard to imagine it. If you look up at the sky though, it's easier to remember. With the blackness bleeding into dark blue. And the moon that looks like a hole in the sky. And the clouds weaving among the stars.

It's empty, and I can imagine that vast space filled with the Lord.

♥

In His love,
Suzanne

i know you see it, but can you hear it?

Listening to: Expression by Helen Jane Long

Quote love: "Trust me, though, the words were on their way, and when they arrived, Leisel would hold them in her hands like the clouds, and she would wring them out like the rain." -The Book Thief 

A lot of people take reading for granted. Really.

For a year before I learned to read, my four year old self envied the people who could. I felt like I had been shut out of something important. Something silent. Something unimaginably fun. Something that could take me away.

I looked around and saw these pictures. But they weren’t full portraits. They were pictures that had been dismantled and stitched into little symbols we call letters. These writhing, knotted symbols marched across paper, telling stories which I didn't know how to see.

And slowly I learned how to take the pieces of those broken pictures and put them back together again. After a while, I learned to make my own puzzle out of them. 

Words are wonderful.

Don’t you forget it.

Okay?

xoxo,                                                                                                                                                                                                                  Suzanne

the things that make you remember

Listening to: My Own Little World by Matthew West.

Quote love: "A moment lasts all of a second, but the memory lives on forever." -Unknown

Last night I was sitting on my bed while I folded clothes. I looked in my closet as I hung up a jacket, and I noticed a white book on the floor.

I flipped through my old script, and it brought into recollection a time I hadn't thought of in a while.

Nearly two years earlier, I was frantically flipping through its pages in a dark hall backstage as we practiced the play of The Chronicles of Narnia.  

It brought into recollection the days when we put on masks and costumes. 

The days when we were kings and queens and dwarves and elves; when we all rushed onstage as someone else. When we clung to wooden swords and hosted a sword fight in the dressing room. It made me think of how much fun we had when we decided to play hide & seek, exploring multifarious classrooms in the building.

It made me think of how we choked back our laughter on performance night when someone forgot the cup backstage, and we improvised and 'drank' from someone's cell phone. 

I remembered how we were sprawled on floor as we read through the play, and someone fell asleep.

How we all laughed when we were scribbling our lines on our hands and forearms the day we were supposed to have our lines memorized. How me and a friend raced through dark hallways, only to find the cast's younger siblings in a room with my mom watching Veggie Tales. I thought of how both of us walked in, asked a toddler to scoot over, and we sat down to watch Veggie Tales.

How we sat in that same darkened hallway and pondered what would happen to the paint job if we were to put bologna slices on a car.

The day of performance, and we're waiting in a back room eating popcorn, listening to Fenris Ulf play the guitar.

It's those times when a camera wouldn't have done much good. Because even though a camera can beautifully capture the emotions and images, when you step back and notice your friends, the music, and the times when you laugh so hard you can't breathe, you know there is no way a camera could capture that. 

.:Me, Kaitlin, Elizabeth, and Ashley:.

In His love and light,

Suzanne

Le temps du chant des oiseaux est venu.

We got a cool front! This one is a little late, I think it may be one of the last ones we get this year. It is an amazing change, as it was getting a bit warm for a while. It’s overcast, windy, and everything is green. I think that is the best weather. It’s also magnificent when it’s cold. There are also lots of wildflowers out, and they are SO beautiful. *grins* A few days ago, my three year old cousin and I were walking and picking daisies. She gave me a handful and told me I needed them if I ‘wanted to act like a girl’. She is so adorable! CHEC’s homeschool prom was on the 10th of April, and it was epic!! My shoulder was hurting for some reason; couldn’t really dance right.

By the way, I saw this somewhere and found it to be somewhat true:
Writers block: When your imaginary friends won’t speak to you.

I’ll post again later!
In Christ,
Jessie

Solomon 2:12 The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come…