We just got home from church

I’m afraid Kitty doesn’t feel good. I’m not sure how old he is—at least a year older than Will, who’s eight—but lately he’s acting ancient. He looks ungroomed and watery-eyed and sad. He can’t jump up on the bed anymore—he does this terribly painful scrambling up the mountainous side. It’s excruciating to watch. He barely tolerates being petted under the best of circumstances, and he hates to be picked up, but lately he’ll sit all pitiful at the foot of the bed, and I think he’s figured out if he does this Hayes or I will lift him up. We just got home from church, it’s storming, and he’s still curled up on the quilt where we left him this morning. Usually he wants to be under the bed in a storm, even if it means hiding with Sylvie.

It sounds so very odd to say that sentence, we just got home from church, as if it were a perfectly normal thing that people do all the time, people who have kitties and come home and make egg salad sandwiches with Duke’s mayonnaise. It is a perfectly normal thing that people do all the time, except we are not exactly normal people. I think, and it’s certainly not normal for us. “What church do you go to?” is a big question in the South, although I have been surprised by how seldom we’ve been asked that since moving to our little town. Maybe people think it irrelevant here—maybe they think, they’d know if you went to their church, and you don’t, so yours doesn’t matter. In my experience, southerners are usually a lot more evangelical about it, souls lingering out there unsaved and whatnot.

Mine’s among them, alas, unbaptized and lukewarm in my acceptance of Jesus as my personal Lord and Savior. Don’t get me wrong—Jesus rocks. Jesus kicked butt. Jesus kept to the path of righteousness, and I’m sorry, but I think the path of righteousness was a pretty liberal one myself. But I made the mistake of taking Old Testament in college and finding a metaphorical interpretation of the Bible really worked for me, and before that I really wondered why, if miracles could happen, they never seemed to. And then I realized that if you bought the church rhetoric, 77% of the world was going to Hell. Along with me. And later, the kids. And Kitty and Sylvie too, of course. Baptists have a pretty strict party line. But somehow, all those folks who’d been sprinkled or dunked were good to go no matter what they did afterwards. Surely that’s more about the church than about God.

You can always tell around here who’s been to church—they’re the dressed up crowd you see early afternoon. We took Laura and Will to McAllister’s after our new member class the other day, and Laura said with this expression of horrified revelation, “We’re the people going out for lunch after church now!” We don’t dress right, and we’re not going to the “right” church, but yep, that’s us now.

Who’d have thought?

The house is quiet

The house is quiet, an oddity I am still unaccustomed to in daylight. Hayes gets home from work in about another hour, but the kids won’t be back from their week at their dad’s until Monday. I hear the hum of the air conditioner, Sylvie snoring her teeny kitty snores every so often, the soft tapping sound my keyboard makes, but behind it all, the quiet.

Summer days go slow, especially when Laura and Will are gone. I usually wake up with Hayes so I can see him a bit before he leaves and then walk on the dirt road behind the house before it gets too hot. Really, even 8:30 is too hot in South Carolina. I work in this desultory way, caught between the tasks left over from last semester and those coming up next year, trying to write and washing clothes in between attempts so that tonight I can say at least I managed to do something today. Kitty comes in and rubs my leg with his head, I run out of printer paper, I make spinach salad with dried cranberries and mandarin oranges and walnuts and feta, I watch the sun move across the floor, I wish for a Sprite and try not to drink one because of the sugar, the calories. Some bad WNOK song lingers in my head from listening to the radio with Laura in the car last week, but it’s only an echo. I haven’t heard SpongeBob SquarePants’s squeaky voice for days, and I both do and don’t miss him chasing earnestly after jellyfish. Sometimes I wander through the house, beautifully clean and staying that way all week with the kids away, and I wonder if this quiet will be all I hear when they grow up and move out, which is coming sooner than I’d like.

But it’s not an empty quiet—rather one filled with potential. I can play Ella Fitzgerald or Chopin or crank the Black Eyed Peas and no one will complain, though I always feel pretentious listening to the classical music, even when I’m alone. Something about the quiet focuses my attention, and in these long weeks in the summer I can let that attention flit here and there without shame. It feels decadent, lush, fruitful. It is decadent.