the rose of kiev

Imagine: You're at the circus, sitting under that great red-and-white striped tent, watching all the glitz and spectacle.  Kernels of popcorn fall from your mouth because you're so mesmerized by the sparkling parade of elephants in the center ring.  Then with a grand flourish,  the ringmaster bellows into his great yellow bullhorn and the spotlight slides up and up to illuminate the band of acrobats waving from a tiny platform.  A thin metal wire stretches before them, and one of the acrobats steps upon it, far above the ground.  You lean forward in your seat, captivated.  With barely a wobble, she successfully crosses to the other side with a small bow; at the second platform, she's handed a long pole to balance in addition on her walk back.  And then her fellow acrobats pile china plates on the ends of her pole, and her arms begin to shake from the weight as she carefully turns to cross again.  As the trick becomes more precarious, your popcorn bag is forgotten, scattered...

Six months ago I put on a white dress and a ridiculously high pair of heels.  I walked down the aisle with my father wearing my mother's veil.  I met Dave at the altar, and we read the vows we had written to each other in front of nearly 300 of our friends and family.  I walked back out of the auditorium with Dave as "First Kiss" from The Last of Mohicans played over the sound of clapping.  We got out to the hallway and hugged each other until our attendants followed, shrieking with happiness for us.  I remember looking down at my new ring through the happy tears and spluttering, "Oh my God, it really happened!"  There was joy, such an awesome amount of joy, in those first five minutes. But there was no magic. Let me explain. I was raised in the church by Christian parents and graduated from a Christian high school.  At every moment in my young life, the wonder of marriage was on a sacred pedestal.  Living together with someone "in sin" was the unthin...

Every time I go to West Virginia it seems that I am being adopted by someone else's family. My high school friend Tabatha brought Amy and I down the week after our graduation to spend a week on the holler where her mother's side of the family lives. I talked Tabatha and Amy into piercing my ear for me, which I quickly regretted with loud obscenities when they picked a needle too small. Later that summer, my dad's then-fiance Leah drove us down to her parents' home for a weekend of card games and adventuring in the woods. That was the week Josiah convinced me to bike down their steep gravel driveway; I came limping back to the house with a bloody hip after I used it as a brake. This past weekend I was officially adopted into a happy mess of McCray, Matheny and Mitchell relatives at an annual family reunion that Dave's Granny Rena and her cousins hold in their small birthtown of Nitro, West Virginia. The wide Kanawha (KA-NAW) River cuts through the soft Appalachian fo...

Marriage is: Like Popping Zits: After an hour-long conversation in the car with Dave, I realized the relief I felt after talking everything out was the same feeling I have when I drain a big pimple. This is the grossest and most effective way I can illustrate what marital conflict is like. Everyone who's endured adolescence knows the different classes of pimples: the surface whiteheads, the simple but deeper blackheads, and then - The MegaZit. It hurts,  it's bright red, it's perched on the tip of your nose, and  you have to wait 3 days before it's ready for you to do anything about it. And the more potato chips and HoHo's you ingest, the more frequently and grotesquely do you break out. But think about it: there are the "whitehead" moments, where you ask each other nicely to please stop leaving cups all over the living room because it's irritating. Then the "blackhead" arguments, at which point you have to talk through your annoyance and a s...

I had been up since seven that morning, which, since I should've been out of bed by 6:30, meant that I had been running late all day. Running behind stresses me out, and as any girl can testify a hormone-stress cocktail is volatile if allowed to mix, and I could feel the spoon stirring inside of me. Even though I was running late to dinner with a friend on campus, as an act of prudence I changed course and sat next to Mirror Lake for 5 minutes to calm down. I sat in the grass and watched the fountain, waiting for the emotions to settle. Then along comes a happy couple of ducks waddling along the edge of the lake toward me pecking at the grass for food. Their boat-shaped hips swayed awkwardly from side to side as their flourescent- orange pancake-thin feet slapped the stones; I noticed the disproportionally pompous curled feathers at the tail of the male and began to laugh out-loud. Never before have I ever been so assured of two of God's attributes - His pleasure in the act of ...

I laid in bed at around six'o'clock in the evening a couple weeks ago, listening to the ceiling fan as I stared at the wall. It had been an exhausting week filled with a rainy birthday, a sinus infection, and not enough time with Dave. Earlier that afternoon he and I sat in the Lowe's parking lot for an hour wearily talking through ways we had let each other down and how to get through the rest of the school quarter. As I began to wake up from the three-hour afternoon nap we had taken together, I contemplated many things that fit into one general heading: Marriage is hard. Those who are married understand that small sentence with every fiber of their experience and being. Those who are not married may be aware of its truth, but the hard wisdom isn't in you until you're in it. But for me, the difficulties have been opening my eyes to see something about God and the importance - the beauty - of freedom in love. What's so strange about God is that He is both a pa...

The other night Dave and I stayed up late to watch an hour-long show on PBS titled "Swimming in Auschwitz"; it was a compilation of interviews of 6 different women, and since it ran without commercials, Dave and I were sucked in until the end. Each of the women lost one or more family members in their stay at the camp; all had an admirable composure and dignity in retelling their stories, and one of the women was even able to recount some of her memories there with laughter.  Laughter. Something I have been learning to appreciate more and more lately are the loving and good-tempered elders in the world. You know who I mean, the people one or two or three generations ahead of us who care about others and are genuinely good-natured. I think they are so precious because they seem to be markedly rare. In my growing appreciation for such people I also have been obtaining a growing knowledge about how  hard  living is; that gratitude, of all the disciplines, gets more difficult wit...