this weekend + giveaway winner announced!

happy friday, friends! i'm so excited for these next two days. they mean late night movie runs, coffee with friends, and (my favorite), sleeping in on cool, clean cotton sheets. we're supposed to have a block party on saturday night, but with the tropical storm looming, this does not appear to be a likely endeavor. but we shall see! either way, i'm excited to rest up, and spend some time with these beautiful people:

p.s. the shabby apple giveaway winner is miss jessie! congrats, dear!

Shabby Apple Giveaway!

i'm so excited to share a $50 shabby apple giveaway with you guys this week! shabby apple is an online dress  boutique that specializes in vintage and retro dresses, like this pretty spring floral number. i'm a fan of the line for their modest, sophisticated lines and throwback flair. wouldn't this nautical striped skirt look great on an evening beach stroll, cup of coffee in hand? i am also swooning over their shirt dresses, like this spearmint polka dot one, which are perfect for the office, and transition great from day to night.

to enter, you must be a follower of this blog and complete the below steps:

required:
1. "like" shabby apple on facebook (required)
2. leave a comment telling me which shabby apple item is your favorite (required)
please include your name and e-mail in your comment.

optional for additional entries:
*for these, please comment with a link to your social media share. thanks! 
3. tweet about this giveaway
4. post about this giveaway on your facebook page
5. blog about this giveaway

*open until this friday, june 7, to U.S. residents only. thank you!

summer on the breezeway

 

there's a little room between the kitchen and the garage of our home that my grandma christened "the breezeway." i like to think of it as the early-morning-coffee-with-the-sunshine-spilling-in-way. or the late-evening-salads-before-walking-way. it's the perfect little space for breathing, i've found. as because it's not quite outside but not quite in, pablo goes crazy over it, running from screen to screen looking out at bunnies in the lawn. one night in april, we sat and rocked on the glider and listened to a prairie home companion as a late spring storm spun outside and sprayed its droplets onto our ankles. pretty soon, it will be winter again and the breezeway won't be as comfortable, so we're soaking up this little nugget of time every chance we can.

recording, dictating and remembering

 

 

in an effort to record and dictate all that is beautiful and lovely and simple and small around me, and also in part to discourage annonymous spam comments that appear to arise when you neglect your little corner of the web for a bit too long, i am determined to write more regularly. if only for myself to read, or my sweet mama.

because there are things like cardinals perched on old swingsets and beans sprouting up through fresh dirt that are so beautiful and tiny and precious that i want to share them. or things like the time this weekend that i saw a tail creeping along the old back steps outside the breezeway and we discovered the black snake that has  plagued nanno's land for years, only to meet its final destiny on the sidewalk beside the wild onions. or how on thursday night i sat feet away from sam beam singing "passing afternoon" in a garden in virginia, my bare feet right in front of him and the knees of my sweet (and indelibly cool) parents pressed gently against my back.

we planted our garden last week and i can see it from the back bedroom window and it brings me deep joy. not because it's fruitful quite yet (in fact, the family of deer who live in our woods may turn it into nature's buffet table), but because it reminds me of the time last weekend when i, ankle deep in dirt and compost, shoveling until my little arms were sore, looked across the yard and saw robert on the mower, and felt entirely grateful for the act of movement, of bending down to push and pull the earth, then molding it into rows for our seedlings, my gloves caked in clay cooking in the may sunshine.

i remember every time i put on my favorite dean martin record and dance in the living room with pablo how quickly time flies and how grand of a thing it is that we have things like blogs to record our memories. i gave my right ring finger a callous in elementary school because i wrote every single thing down in a burgundy floral journal marked "read and die" (a bit extreme for entries filled with heart doodles and misspelled words). now the callous is gone and all i want to do is share my writing. funny how a little time and perspective creeps up on us day by day, isn't it?

so here's to a week of living, really living, the little moments, and throwing shouts of praise back to Heaven for each one of them.

around these parts

 

 

 

1. on the way to study scripture by the lake. pablo had just woken up, so excuse his bedhead.
2.  springtime, everyone loves you already. you can stop showing off now. 
3. hotel room in the middle of the afternoon, in the middle of nowhere, north carolina. getting ready to see a community play that ended up blowing us away.
4. one of many pit stops on the way home this weekend. cliffs of the neuse state park. a playground in the fifties, it sits empty in these cool spring months. perfect for frolicking and wasting time.

i love weekends, and getaways. and weekend getaways. life is moving slow these days, and that's good by me.

on mondays, this sometimes hits me hardest

there was a drudge this morning. a physical slowness that hit just about the second my eyes adjusted to the sunshine spilling in across the covers. the heaps of winter afghans and blankets piled onto our bed in the middle of april in a futile attempt to save money by turning off the a/c unit, which works well on humid, sticky weeks like the last, but not so great when spring dallies a bit too long with winter and nights get down to near freezing.

i awoke and immediately prayed my morning prayer, that the Lord would open the doors to His will for my life today. that i would live as He saw fit today. that today, He would place the people in my path that needed someone to journey with, if even for a second over the water cooler.

there was no burst of excitement, unlike this weekend, filled with celebrations both big and tiny, the sweetest little pocket of rest. rather, there were papers, spilled coffee and car maintenance issues to wrestle with. then i read these beautiful, heart-stirring words, and realized that here, today, was indeed a blessed miracle of the most holy sort:

My eyes will never know China’s jade green Li River. I’m never going to see those black-haired boys

under straw brimmed hats fish off their bamboo rafts with the ringed cormorants, the mist rising behind over the karst formations, surreal and dark. I am never going to be ascending the Loita Hills of Kenya to witness the dance of gazelles migrating up by the millions from the Serengeti. I am not going to be swimming the sapphire waters of some South Pacific grotto, or sitting up late listening to the wind whisper through the Sequoia woods, or spending my golden years scaling the summit of emerald Machu Picchu.

I run my hand across the thick of the terry towels. I’m a farmer’s wife. I’m the homeschooling mother of six children. There are no fancy degrees, titles, diplomas hanging on these finger-smudged walls. Are there places that must be known, accomplishments that must be had, before one is really ready?

Isn’t it here? Can’t I find it here?

These very real lungs will breathe in more than 11,000 liters of air today, and tonight over our farm will rise the Great Hexagon of the blazing winter stars-Sirius, Rigel, ruby Aldebran, Capella, the fiery Gemini twins, and Procyon, and in the center, scarlet Betelgeuse, the red supergiant larger than twice the size of earth’s orbit around the sun.

And at the same time,I will embrace the skin of a boy child that my body grew from a seed. The low heavens outside the paned windows fill with more snowflakes than stars, no two-stacked crystals the same; the trees in the wood draw in collective green breath to the still of January hibernation, and God in the world will birth ice from His womb, frost of heaven, bind the chains of the Pleiades, loose the cords of Orion, and number again the strands on my head (Job 38:31; Matthew 10:30).

Isn’t it here? The wonder? Why do I spend so much of my living hours struggling to see it? Do we truly stumble so blind that we must be affronted with blinding magnificence for our blurry soul-sight to recognize grandeur? The very same surging magnificence that cascades over our every day here. Who has time or eyes to notice?

-from one thousand gifts by ann voskamp

there is magnificence here, blinding, if we clean our vision enough to let it permeate. today, i am clearing the smudges of dissatisfaction, impatience and anxiety. will you join me?

a weekend wish

it's supposed to be overcast this weekend in our little corner of carolina. we've got plans to spread compost dirt in the garden, attend a wedding for some sweet friends, and crash the local greek church spaghetti dinner on sunday.

hope your weekend is beautiful and blessed. i hope you get to help someone, catch a sunrise, and laugh terribly hard over the next two days. for those little moments are what makes the week ahead bearable. those little nuggets of escape--parentheses on a string of weekday mornings, coffees, meetings and deadlines--those make it worth it, after all.