The Nose Knows

I love seasons, and I love having all four of them.  I don't really have a favorite season, but since it's fall right now, let's say fall is my favorite.  It's easy to get nostalgic or vaguely philosophical over the seasons changing, and I could come up with plenty of analogies about the coloring, crisping leaves being a picture of shedding a little more of my youth.  While there's a place for those analogies and nostalgia, plenty of people have talked about them, and they have probably said it all better than I could.  I'm not feeling especially contemplative today anyway, but I do often enough that I'm sure I'll write down a vague philosophical thought or two before fall is over.

Today, though, I've just been enjoying the way fall smells.  One of the things I appreciate about seasons is their different scents, and in this area, I do think that autumn wins.  Winter has the chilly, clean scents of fresh snow and pine trees, spring tends to smell like mud, but it also has hints of baby flowers and rain thrown in there.  Summer is a whole array of smells--freshly cut grass, bright flowers of every description, and the sweet nighttime perfumes that I love, from mysterious blossoms I can somehow never find or identify.

But the smells of autumn are different.  They're strong, intense, and specific.  Smell is supposed to be the most evocative and memory-tied sense, and maybe that's part of why fall makes us nostalgic.  Scents stir up memories, so we can't help but think about the past in fall.  When I lived in Austria, I remember walking down the street one evening shortly after I'd moved there; the smell of autumn campfire smoke drifted past, and suddenly I felt at home in this new place.  I scribbled down a sentence--"tonight I was walking and smelled a backyard campfire, the most familiar thing yet."

Even though I miss the country smells of being at home, fall has still followed me down here to DC.  My walk home from the metro station in particular is an olfactory delight, even though it's just a few short blocks of houses.  It doesn't really feel like fall to me until I have smelled campfire smoke, leaf piles, apple cider, and cinnamon, and I've enjoyed all of these scents on my walk home.  A chill in the air, a bright blue sky, any combination of these smells, and a perfect autumn day is complete.

Noses are sadly underrated.  We worry about them being too big and obnoxious, mostly, or just being slightly odd.  Even the word "nose" is a little odd, and people don't generally refer to the nose as their favorite feature.  I'm sure some people do, but it always takes a backseat to eyes and lips when we're talking about facial features.  Food and wine connoisseurs appreciate their noses, I'm sure, so this is some redemption.  

I sometimes wonder what it must be like to be a dog, to learn about everything through smell.  Or looking back at history, I wonder what famous places would smell like.  Did the Colosseum sicken Roman noses at the end of the day, or was the splendor of castles and palaces a bit diminished in the summer by excessive BO?  Were new scents part of the adventure to pioneers exploring the American west?

Noses add such an interesting perspective to our sensory picture of the world, and I love that God chose to give them to us.  Fall wouldn't be the same without its scents, so shut your eyes and appreciate the next leafy, smoky, or apple-y smell your nose finds, and enjoy whatever memory it flings you into.

Here's to noses and the things they smell; cheers and sniffs.

Swiss Sweets

And here we are again after yet another blog hiatus, but I'm back and hopefully I mean it this time!  I realize that the majority of this blog has been a big hiatus, but let's see if this time will be the one.  Today seemed like a good day to get back into it, because it is my nonagenarian grandmother's birthday, and she is certainly worthy of a blog post.

I love this black and white picture.  This beautiful lady is my grandmother, Mrs. Sweet, and yes, that is her real name.  I enjoy being half a Sweet, and this name seems entirely appropriate for my grandmother, who has embodied the word "dear" for longer than I can remember.  Let's pause for a quick side note: I'm not trying to sneakily imply that my grandma is the only person in my family who deserves the Sweet last name, but as this post is about her, I won't be elaborating on anyone else's Sweetness at this time.

As I was thinking about what to say about my grandma today, trying to come up with a summary of her that would fit into a few paragraphs, I realized I was approaching this the wrong way.  I missed the majority of my grandmother's life by not being born yet, so I'm probably not the best one to comment on her earlier years.  But I have known her for the last 24 years from a special perspective that I share only with her ten other grandchildren, and I can certainly find a few snapshots taken through this lens.

Since this darn-cute photo of my grandma, grandpa, and one of their great-grandchildren (my youngest niece) certainly fits the theme, let's go back to the word "dear."  My grandma probably uses this word more often than most people, and she is quick to look for the good in anyone.  Even people who might fall into the "undear" category usually have at least one redeeming quality, and my grandmother will find it.  She is quick to compliment, and she can put others at ease by asking questions and being interested in them.  I was talking to a friend recently about how my generation seems to have lost the ability to carry on good conversations and truly get to know others, but I can look to my grandmother as one who can keep a conversation from falling flat.  As you can see from the pictures, she has remained a classy lady in looks as well as personality, once described to my mother by a friend as "your movie star mom."

This side of our family is Swiss, and my grandma has helped us appreciate and enjoy our family history and Swissness.  I always enjoy hearing about the background of our family, and my grandmother knows a lot.  She is intelligent and well-educated; I think she's willing to give just about anything the chance to be interesting, and will happily take the opportunity to learn something new.  My siblings and I have all benefitted from the writing ability and excellent grammar she passed on to our mother.  I think our family has a reputation for scrutinizing spelling, apostrophes, and anything else that might lead a sentence astray, and I thank my grandmother for this.

It's probably good that I've only known my grandmother for my lifetime, as I'm already running out of room, and I now have to sum up my summary of her.  Beyond grace and grammar, I can also thank her for instilling in me a love of cooking from scratch, waving to guests as they drive off down the street, knitting, travel and learning interesting things, and never rinsing dishes before putting them in the dishwasher--they're about to get washed, so just scrape them well and save the water!  In my memory she has always put a high value on our family relationships and time together, and she has never been afraid to graciously laugh at her own expense.  I'm thankful for all this and more in my grandmother, and I hope that one day I can grow into some of the things she's passed along to me and my cousins.  At the very least, I can take advantage of the opportunity her birthday provides to use the word "nonagenarian," which I'm sure the writer in her would appreciate.

Happy 91st birthday, Grandma Sweet!

Sparrow Moments

Okay, it has been more than a month since I've written anything, and that's just ridiculous.  I realize I have no one to blame but myself, and I'm sure none of you have been holding your breath waiting for a new post from me, but still, I'm sorry about that.  If for some reason you have been holding your breath, then I'm even sorrier.  I really do want to be more regular at writing on here!  This post has been rolling around in my head for weeks (as you'll see), and I'm finally getting around to posting it.  So here it is: the moment you all have been waiting for!  And by "you all," I mean me.

A few weeks ago (when I started writing, it was only one week ago...pitiful!) I visited Arlington National Cemetery with a good friend and her family.  She and I had been wanting to go to Arlington for a while, and we finally made it on a scorchy 95-degree day, which is a cold and clammy memory compared to the 115-degree monsters we had last week!  Despite the heat and crowds, it was fascinating to be there and definitely worth the visit.  Acres of meticulously groomed lawns, with graves arranged in perfect rows, columns, and diagonals that would have made many a marching band director proud. 

I could have wandered through them for hours, wondering about each of the men and women whose names were written in stone.  Old graves and battlefields stir up a distant longing in me to know each name, each person who had a whole life, but all I know of them is their death and the stone in front of me. It's easy for me to become calloused to this, to overlook the reality of people that I don't personally know, so I make a point of stopping to think about these names and their stories.  I imagine them and their lives, what they might have lived through given the dates of their birth and death; I compare their ages when they died to people I do know personally, and it becomes much more serious to me when I put these lives into perspective with my own. 

I think about this kind of thing a lot when I am in cities, riding public transportation, or in big crowds.  Each of these people around me has a whole life.  They all have minds full of thoughts, places they are going, people they love and miss, things they are dreading.  The only thing we have in common is this one, briefest of moments, when perhaps we both want our train to arrive on time.  And yet, our amazing and wonderful God knows each one of us, personally and deeply.  He loves us and cares to know those thoughts, dreads, loves and sorrows.  I can be so caught up in my self-centered thoughts or ambitions, barely realizing the reality of another's life passing right in front of me, because it has nothing to do with me.   And yet God has chosen to love me!  I want to love the people around me like He does, without myself as the center.  I pondered all of this walking past the graves, people whose moments on this earth are finished.  One day my own will be too, and will I have spent them on myself alone? 

This was my sparrow moment.  Then we came here:

The Tomb of the Unknowns, perhaps the most famous place in a famous cemetery.  You can't see it from the low-quality phone photo, but engraved on the front of this tomb are these words:

Here rests in

honored glory

an American

soldier

known but to God

Soldiers guard this tomb 24 hours a day in any weather, and these sentinels are an elite group.  The changing of the guard ceremony is famous, and it was sobering to see the structured care that was taken over this tomb, and I couldn't help but think of the structured care God takes of me.  As I sat there in the shade, sweating in my sleeveless top and flip-flops, I watched a man, whose name none of us knew, march in the sun.  He wore a black, long-sleeved uniform and a black hat, and marched back and forth in perfect counts of 21, to honor a soldier no one knows. 

A soldier, in fact, "known but to God," which is what finally hit me.  Being made and known and loved by God is what makes each of these people important, what makes me not the point, and the reason we can hope in Jesus.  He knows us, He loves us, and He has saved us, through His perfect, structured care.  As much care, planning, and dedication as I saw go into a ceremony for a nameless man, it pales in comparison to the God's care for each of us.  To everyone I pass on the street, I am simply another pair of unknown eyes, and yet God has chosen to love me.  Sparrow moments for sure.

Backstage Privileges

As a quick update, I moved back to the Washington, DC area today.  I'll start training tomorrow for my Staff Assistant job in a Congressional office!  

But that's not the point of this post.  As usual, I'm not the point, and I've been especially struck by that in the past few weeks.  My mother has reminded me countless times that I'm not the point, and God has really been working this into me, as I'm beginning to understand and appreciate it.  I was home for about three weeks before coming back to DC for my job, and in that time I have celebrated a friend's 78th birthday, supported and helped a friend stand up to some serious opposition to Jesus, played and laughed with my three nieces, been excited for a friend who's moving to a new state, seen prayers answered when a friend's visa was renewed, watched a friend get baptized, and gone to two weddings.

This is amazing!  None of these things really had to do with me--it was not my birthday, my baptism, my visa, or my wedding.  I was not being persecuted, and my cutie nieces are not my children, yet I got the privilege of being involved in all of these things.  I was a bridesmaid in one of the weddings, between my two good friends Ben and Lauren, who have now been married for two days!  Standing in support of my friends, agreeing with them and lifting them up to God as they begin married life has been such an honor, and this more than anything made me appreciate watching from the sidelines.  God knows we need each other, and He's given us friends to love and support us, and it is such an honor to share people's lives.  I got to learn by watching my friends' relationship, share the joy and fun of their wedding, pray and fight for them when things were difficult, and appreciate the depth and honesty of their walks with God.  All of this, and I was just backstage to their lives, moving around some insignificant props but learning and enjoying it all.

People are a privilege!  It's so easy to enjoy friendships for what we get out of them, but I'm glad to be learning what an honor it is to invest my own time and love in my friends.  Jesus called loving each other the second greatest commandment, second only to loving Him!  So being backstage, turning the focus off of myself to support and honor the people in my life, is an incredibly godly thing.  And like so many things, when we put ourselves aside and obey God, it is SO much fun!  It's wonderful that I am not the point.  I know it sounds funny to say that, and of course I still enjoy attention, but setting myself aside has a secret enjoyment and depth that nothing I can get for myself will equal.

"Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends" (John 15:13). While this certainly includes being willing to die for your friends, it also includes being willing to serve them while you live.  That is a life that pleases God!

And honestly, with this gorgeous girl around, who wants to look at me?? :)

Introducing: Introductions

I don't like introductions.  That is, I don't like to read them.  In person or in speeches, they're helpful, informative, and usually quick, but in writing, they drag on so much that I can't take it.  Maybe my college career and the textbooks that went with it are still too fresh on my heels, but pages that somehow require lowercase Roman numerals just make me suspicious.  I've read too many textbooks to trust them, and they make fun books feel like work.  They always lead to a sneaky array of introductions, forewords, prefaces, and who knows what kind of endless books-before-the-book, so I usually skip them.  I suspect most people do this.

Fortunately for me, most people will not be reading my blog, and thus they will not mind that I decided to write an introduction.  I have to admit, despite my bad experiences with them, introductions do have their place, so here goes.  For an explanation of the title, see the link to the right.  I've been wanting to do some writing for a while, to get better at it, and just to organize my thoughts.  Life is exciting and God's work in mine is reality.  I learn better if I pay attention, and what He is teaching me is worth recording.  At this point I don't really have a main theme in mind for my blog, but here I am in writing it, so please bear with my eclectic topics and just general inexperience in blogginess.  I enjoy my random thoughts, and I would enjoy hearing any of yours too!

If you decide to skip my introduction, I will never know and never be offended!  If you read it, thanks, and I will leave you with this thought from a woman looking back at her own life and her own writing.  Like her, I don't want to be so wrapped up in myself that I can't appreciate the things I'm learning, but I want to take seriously the things that shape us and mold our lives.  I found this quote in, yes, an introduction, and it makes me wonder how many gems I've missed in years of introduction avoidance.

"Besides, I have a certain respect for the early efforts of this struggling adolescent, who now seems so many lives removed from the self of today.  I can laugh at her and am often embarrassed by her, but I do not want to betray her.  Let her speak for herself."
Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Bring Me a Unicorn, 1972.