The House Goat: 2024 Recap

In years past I have had something brewing in my mind before I sit down to write this, but this year there is just a quiet buzz of silence. Maybe I used up all my writing words in the Pears Part 2. I think we pushed too hard, worked ourselves a bit too ragged. If we looked as we felt I think our fingers and boots, the edges of our jackets and my self-cut hair would be singed and black, crispy little fringes all around. Black soot on our face making our eyes appear a little brighter, staring at each other in believing disbelief of all that has occurred in just some countable months.

I'm being extreme but weariness feels extreme doesn’t it?

Something past tired, a pulling down or backward of sorts.

I wrote this poem early in 2024, charred fingers and all:

Everything has come undone.

Every plan we put in place,

we walk forward

and then walk back again

Staring at the tops of our shoes

A constant trying

A teasing forward glance

Did we not ask enough?

“What say you, Lord?”

About the house

The land

The trees

The school

The church

The dog

The faith

A constant trying

to stop the undoing

Then You say

“I will make all things new”

And I believe you

“Be strong and take heart”

And I want to

“You will see my goodness”

And I beg it to be true

“In the land of the living”

Lord, let it be.

(Psalm 27:13-14)

Things did get better and easier, though I'm not sure it was due to our “working hard” at all.

Just His hand in all things turning ashes into beauty as He loves to do.

Our little church did not fold, and instead is holding steady with a pastor who said yes to us because God told him to. We finished our house projects,

grew about 100 cucumbers and zinnias and sunflowers for days.

We settled out of homeschool and back into public with new plans and systems for help with dyslexia. On my walks I found a house and it felt like God had saved it for us, for when we were ready. We moved in the first week of November. Renters moved into our last house on December 31st. The last day of the year which feels like a proper wrapping up of things.

I was watching the sun come up through the leafless trees a couple day ago. Barely peeking through tiny pinole glimmers between the millions of branches. It looked like glitter. Later that day we went to the river because it was 90 degrees, perhaps the actual last day of summer in Texas. I waded out in the water to watch the kids climb a huge rock, proud and simultaneously scared and trying not to scream, “be careful!” across the water. The sun was just right, hitting the ripples from me to the kids. It too looked like glitter. Glitter, my least favorite of all things. My friend Kellyann calls it “the herpes of the craft world.” Ha!

But when LIGHT is glittering, I cannot resist it. I asked the Lord what he wanted me to learn from all this “illumination.” I'm not fully sure yet, but I think it's just that the reflection of His light is everywhere. I can watch it in others peoples lives and be just as informed of His goodness when it is towards them as I am when it is towards me. I’ve seen so much glitter this year in all the ways he watches over Nell, the elderly woman behind the old house (her story coming soon.) In new born babies, me finding a mentally disabled man at just the right time, in the flowers and pears, friends' good health reports, and in Perry reading a page in a novel for the first time.

May we recognize the light on and around us this year.

“Rejoice with those who rejoice” Romans 12:15

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Songs of the year:

Tecovas - Rob Goates

My Arms were always around you- Peter Bradley Adams

A Song for My Children- Kristene DiMarco

Books read:

Nuggly (kids) Loved.

My side of the mountain (kids) Loved.

Song for a whale (kids) Medium love

Abigail and big start over (kids)