Springtime in Indiana

May 13, 2025

Beloved:
          The nameplate outside the door said, Miss Hill ~ Grade 3, and yet I knew for sure I was dreaming of the future, not the past.  The prior teacher had left me all her things so I wasn’t nervous except for how tiny my classroom was.  As my students tumbled in, it got even smaller ~ but somehow also bigger.  And happier.  I shared an office with the teacher in the classroom next door.  He was a quilter, of course.  The dream only needed a garden and a golden retriever for my whole life to be covered!
          Our heads and hearts are so packed with memory and information, even our dreams cannot hold it all up to the light for us, but the dreams that show me the sweet parts make it worth waking up to this world again.  Besides, it’s springtime in Indiana.  Irises and pinies (peonies to you fancy people) are exploding and folks are getting in their gardens.  I can hear a chipmunk chirruping as they rebuild their eleventy-hundredth nest inside the downspout by my study window while everything is blanketed in yellow pollen.  I don’t deserve to be this happy.  I have not been good enough nor done enough good to be as happy as such dreams prove I am.
          Such is grace – the gift of God and the capacity of people to receive the joy stitched into creation.  Joy not manufactured by any human effort but exclusively divine, in origin and design.  Ours is to notice and be grateful, to eat and drink at this table of grace, enough to be carried through the hard and scary parts of life in this world, back to the table again and again for a lifetime.  And, maybe, now and then to sleep and dream of times and places as perfect as a third grade classroom full of kids and books and art projects hanging in a window.
          Bloomington may get a little more rain today, my new plants will drink it up, and my irises will sparkle all the more.  I pray the day holds some perfection for you too.