the obligatory autumn post

I love it. Last wednesday I had a day off from work and started it off, thanks to my sweet Luke, with breakfast in bed. After he ate (in 2 minutes) and rushed out the door to work, I took Rue on a walk in our beautiful backyard park. I think it's safe to say that we are both proud to be a part of this neighborhood. It can be a hard neighborhood for many folks, including us, but there is a lot to savor in this place. I've learned to look for what it has to offer: what is beautiful and what is ugly rubbing shoulders; the darkness grappling with the light.

I realized recently that Luke and I are not really in any position to argue with Louisville right now. We have a house that we're doing some real grown-up repairs on, a couple of acres across the river we want to buy, and neighbors that we're coming to know. I walk the streets of this neighborhood every day - and I imagine the day when it's us who have lived in this neighborhood for 15 years, when it's not new and unfamiliar anymore. Then maybe we will see, from our kitchen window in the Winter or front porch in the Spring, the changes that happen subtly over time. That's why we're here. It's hard to imagine the things that can come and almost even harder to remember to look for it.

Perhaps, in the future, the shouts and the traffic and the sirens will become normal to us. Perhaps this neighborhood will swell with love. Perhaps the young men will play football in the Fall and hold good jobs and have good manners and love the women they're with.


It's my first Fall in this house, with my husband and our new life. My pots and pans shudder with each weight-bearing truck that passes us on Oak Street. The branches of the tree in our neighbor's backyard shakes it's leaves like golden snow from a burdened winter cloud. The men in this neighborhood, black and white, do their work with cigarettes still in their mouths. Such a man came over to me today, toothless and serene, his eyes as dark as his face, as I tried to lift the front end of my car over a 5 gallon bucket wedged underneath. He walked purposefully toward the tire and lifted. I noticed he had on a gold wedding ring, a plastic Stop 'n Go bag in his hand, and a dark blue worker's uniform with a name tag I couldn't read. I snatched the bucket and it was over instantly. I thanked him twice and he walked away, my neighbor for a moment.

panoramarama

luke recently acquired a new phone. it's similar to those iphones and smartphones and whatnot - which he loves, but i have no great jealousy over. EXCEPT that he has a panoramic feature on his phone. we used this quite a bit in chicago and have begun "panoramic picture sunday" with his family over lunch. here are a few of the results (consequently, you'll get a peek at what we've been up to...):







oh the fun!
more to come.
with love,
katherine

beirut by the lake

After some recent job transitions for Luke and stepping back into the busy-ness of Fall for both of us, we decided we'd kick off this new season with...a vacation.
we woke up this morning, fed the chickens and the dog, locked the doors and started the dishwasher and drove straight up North to Chicago. We skirted the city on Lake Shore Drive, taking in all the runners and bikers and fog-hugged towers to pull in to Metropolis Coffee, where there was, wonderfully, a cozy couch waiting for us.
Here's to a weekend full of relaxation, refreshment, enjoying one another, and blowing a month's worth of budgeted coffee and fun money in one weekend.

here are some things

we fell in love.


we got married.


we went away with each other.




we came back.


we have a pup

we have chickens


he works on a farm, where I sometimes come and work alongside him (and toss rotten strawberries at his back). and sometimes our sweet nephews come and help.





we cook for one another




and that's pretty much what's going on. :)

mornings with the pup

christmas miracles (heart-warming stories from that yule-tide time)

one christmas as a young girl i walked into my parents' shoe closet to behold a large, milky-white plastic play kitchen - complete with stove, overhead microwave, fold-out bar and mini-refrigerator. For the next two weeks, i was drunk with the possibilities of the gift that i, the older and more culinarily experienced sibling was about to receive.
when christmas morning came, i saw my kitchen-shaped present next to the tree - glowing at me in recognition. as i stepped over all the other, lesser presents toward my glorious gift, wrapped in paper plaid print, something terrible stopped me mid-climb. A scrawl of words glared at me from the scotch-taped Christmas tag:

to: Mariah; from: Mrs. Cooking Claus!

I watched in a daze of dissapointment while my parents helped her tear the paper away from the miniature manufactured homemaker’s dream. She stepped away from her present, her mouth already chapped and covered with christmas chocolate, and exclaimed,
“what is it?!”

And, so, that year, it was a christmas miracle i didn't kill her.

- katherine valentine

i used to get up in the middle of the night when i was real little and use a blade to peel the scotch tape from the wrapping paper so i could open my gifts and see what they were, then rewrap them with fresh tape.... that's not really a miracle i guess, but that's how i did it.

- jason irvine

Two years ago I returned home from my mom's house on Christmas day to find that my house had been robbed and all my stuff was gone. I was a wreck, and I had to leave in two days to go out of town for a little over two weeks. I got the cops over there, filled out a report, etc. Then flew out west two days later.

I went to Phoenix first off to visit my cousin. We hung around there for a couple of days and then we went up north to see the grand canyon. While we were sneaking into the park we came across a forest fire on the side of the road outside Tusayan, AZ. It was small, but it was creeping along the ground headed for a group of dead trees. We got out of the truck and got to work putting out the fire. We didn't get it all the way out, but we pushed it back away from the trees enough that they didn't go up. I got my cousin's GPS and called 911 to give them lat. and long. coordinates so they could locate us and send a fire truck. By the time they showed up the fire was just politely burning in the middle of a large black patch of former shrubs and pine needles. The fire crew sprayed some foam on the remnant of the fire and thanked us for our work. We never got caught sneaking into the park. Maybe the miracle is that he and I were fated, Owen Meany style, to save the state of Arizona from a fiery death on a cold January morning. If I had let the robbery bother me too much I'd have canceled my trip and that would have meant an empty gravel road in Arizona and a forest fire that was allowed to grow up.

True story (even if it's a bit grandiose).

- nick o'brien

when i was younger and still visited my father i made it clear that i needed a pony. seriously, i needed a real pony. probably the coolest thing my dad ever did was buy me a 5 foot purple horse with a feathering white mane. I loved that thing and 10 minutes later set it aflame with a radiator heater. smelled like complete shit. moral of story: most things i really want end up smelling like shit. hah.

- mickie winters

do you have any christmas miracle stories you'd like to share? send an email to learntoletgo@gmail.com with the subject "christmas miracle," and you, too, could share your story with all the attentive/badgering readers involved in the interweb!

"camera phone" or "an abbreviated catalogue of summer"