the author of the next chapter
The other night I had a dream that the Prophet spoke to me. He was speaking to everyone, over the pulpit, and I was watching him on my laptop screen like I always do during General Conference, but all of a sudden, in my dream, I knew he was speaking to me and me alone.
He told me to pack up my things and move myself & my family to Salem, Massachusetts. So we did. We found a house on Zillow, with 5 bedrooms, near the coast. In my dream, it felt so significant - Salem is the town well known for the Puritan witch hunts and burnings. I was consumed with thoughts about modern Christianity’s fallen forms, and how in its very first chapters on this continent it had gone despairingly wrong. In my dream, we would park ourselves on that spot because the Prophet of God told us to, and in the dream it felt like it was representational of ownership of past mistakes. It was a form of identifying ourselves AS Christians, despite the portions of Christian history we would prefer to forget.
In my dream, my lot in life was to wait, in that house, on the coast, looking Eastward for the Son of God to return.
When I woke up, I knew I wasn’t actually supposed to move to Salem, MA. I still downloaded Zillow and looked at a few houses for fun, seeing if I could find the one from my dream. For almost a million dollars, I found something halfway similar.
The real significance of this dream for me was that I don’t think I’ve had a Second Coming dream since I was in high school. I used to have them quite frequently. The scenarios varied greatly, but I was always full of both fear and faith simultaneously. I still remember details of some of them - me ushering innocent people into a safe room. me watching with dread as evil men plundered the building with weapons, me reassuring children and adults alike who were drowning spiritually, letting them lean on my faith for a moment. Sometimes there were aliens, sometimes storms, sometimes everyone was simply running around confused. But my dream always ended the same way: the sun breaking over the hills at dawn, my heart rising into my throat, a realization that the Savior had returned, and then I’d wake up.
These past couple of years have forced me to ask myself a lot of hard questions. Some - most - don’t have answers.
I’ve seen the fulfillment of the prophecy that “peace will be taken from the earth” in the last days.
I’m learning to shrug off the responsibility of thinking, always, about everyone, and what everything means, for everyone, every minute of every day. I cannot control other people. I am not personally responsible for the stupidity of others. People are wild and independent; our God-given agency encompasses the agency to be willfully ignorant. God is allowing everyone to choose so that we can all stand accountable for our choices.
This is hard for me to accept in the face of our healthcare system being pushed toward collapse by people’s choices, but I am capable of feeling peace.
I’m starting by refusing to tune in to the rhetoric of social media. With my extra time this week, I noticed something I had missed before: the webs spun by local spiders during the night, catching the light of the morning sun.
Peep the many smaller spiderwebs in the grass! Those spiders are hard at work during the night!
We have a new friend in our house: a lizard who found his way indoors somehow, and consistently evades capture. We’ve stopped trying to catch him and have simply accepted him as a pet. His name is Frank.
Here, Gwen is offering him markers so he can color and feel welcome in our home.
Spoiler alert: the lizard does not feel like coloring.
On Tuesday, I attended my first playgroup activity with some local Latter-day Saint moms. We all went to a trampoline park in Bossier that was having a Toddler Time discount.
I met three moms who seem very outgoing and fun. I’m stoked about hanging out with them more. The one who arranged this activity invited me to a couple other gigs she was putting together, including a karaoke night at her house.
There was another mother there who wasn’t local - she was from New Orleans! She had fled north before Hurricane Ida and was staying with her parents in Shreveport. She had three children very close in age, and reported that her house now has a hole in the roof, but is otherwise intact and un-flooded. The rest of her neighborhood was safe from damages as well. I warned her about the phony, unqualified roofing companies that typically spring up in the wake of a hurricane, do sub-par work, get paid, and then disappear to avoid accountability. She told me she’d heard of that happening as well and had already called a company they had worked with before, who had been in business for 5+ years. Thank goodness!
Gwen happily fiddled with arcade games while I chatted with the family from New Orleans.
The rest of the day was a whirlwind, as Tuesdays always are.
Gwen was so sad over the prospect of going back to daycare that I decided to bring her with me to teach my classes, just to see how it would go. I brought the tablet along and she happily played in the corner while I taught my homeschool kids.
After we went to pick up Abby, we stopped at Dollar General for some snacks. When we returned to the church, we found out that we needed to move rooms! Because of Labor Day weekend, the Monday kids in the ACT prep class missed their chance to take a practice test. They needed a room where they could adequately spread out and have quiet, so they needed my room! The only other space for me to go was in the foyer. So I squashed my girls into a chair with tablets and snacks, set up my art supplies on a card table, and attempted to teach my 3:30 student, who was painting, while all the after school kids filtered in and stood around us while they ate their snacks. Abby, who was very excitable, wanted to know what time it was every 2-3 minutes because she usually goes to the elementary tutoring room during the second hour. Janice had to come shoo the extra kids away a few times to give us some space.
The final art class was a bit easier, but still very cramped. It’s a very old church and I had an art projector that I had hoped to use with the kids, but the one outlet in the foyer didn’t work. By the time classes were over, I was asking Weston to hurry and come pick the girls up so I could clean up the supplies without also having to chase Gwen around (she was now bored with the tablet and very curious about what the other students were doing in other rooms).
All in all, I determined that even though it was an extra crazy week with losing my classroom, in future weeks Gwen WILL be attending daycare. Whew!
Abby working on a very detailed drawing during my 3:30 class
After that incredibly long day, Weston got the fire pit operational and cooked us some hot dogs. I was almost too tired to pick mine up and eat it.
I’m falling further and further behind as the days march on and this blog post is still unfinished, so I’m going to quickly dump some photos and say what I feel like saying about each of them.
Redoing Abby’s room with pink paint (Flamingo Feather by Behr) and gold vinyl polka dots!
Our neighborhood has long, quiet roads and many many trees. One very wealthy man - a former Louisiana governor, I heard - owns a huge chunk of this land and will not sell it or develop it because it surrounds his big mansion with many acres of wilderness. I hope that’s true. I love these woods.
There’s lots of variety in this neighborhood. Our house, an empty lot, a double wide with lots of porch decorations, a massive mansion with a pool, more empty lots, a single family home, woods. All good people.
Reverently, quietly, lovingly we think of Thee.
Reverently, quietly, softly sing the melody.
Reverently, quietly, humbly now we pray - let Thy Holy Spirit dwell in our hearts today.
A painting in progress. For our living room.
Teaching art has been going better and better with every passing week. I’m getting the hang of connecting with my students.
One thing it’s causing me to do is to humbly reflect on all the years it’s taken me to become the artist that I am. I was once where my students are. Years and years of practice and study have resulted in me being able to paint the way I do. I am so grateful for the time and effort Past Me has put in, and now Present Me is going to keep painting and studying so Future Me can paint even better.
A wool blanket and having to watch Mom type on the computer will do this to a person.
We had the pleasure of meeting Johnny Appleseed at the library! He was in the area planting trees. I don’t want to spoil this for anybody, but he’s married to our local librarian!
SPIDER GWEN!!!
Lately I’m living by something I saw on a sign at Hobby Lobby -
“I do not fear the next chapter because I know the Author.”
And the song that Johnny Appleseed sings in the Disney cartoon, “The Lord is good to me, and so I thank the Lord!”
