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The low haunting tremolo floats off the waters and cuts through the sound of the glass storm door creaking open and clicking shut. It drifts through Kenny Chesney’s voice coming from a radio propped against a beach lounger and settles in my ears. It mingles with lyrics about pickups and Jesus and beer and boondocks.

It’s early evening, and the Minnesota summer air is thick and wet, a damp wool blanket compared to the thin, dry heat of our life in the sun-baked kiln of Turkey. Above, the oak canopy is a mosaic of greens, throwing dappled light onto the sand where our afternoon on the lake has been left in disarray: striped beach towels still damp, someone’s discarded flip flops, and a scattering of plastic shovels, buckets, and little piles of shells my daughter and her cousins have been collecting over the last few days.

She runs towards me now in a burst of motion, her wet Crocs making a rhythmic squelch across the beach and grass. She dumps another pile of shells into my lap, sending grains of sand and water droplets across the pages of my book. She asks me to count her mosquito bites on the back of her knees.

For a moment, our world feels almost entirely contained within the hypnotizing slosh of the waves, the faint burning smell of a nearby campfire, and the screeches and giggles from my niece and nephews. Chesney changes to Buffet, and I adjust my baseball cap. It’s the one time of year I stomach this genre of music and this choice of attire, a costume that feels strange and specific to this short, annual timeframe in the Upper Midwest. Then the wail hits again. A mournful cry, almost like an eerie human’s moan, echoes from beyond the shore and slices through our evening.

The other week, at a playground down the street from my parents’, a woman next to me, pushing her child in the line of swings, struck up a conversation. It’s polite small talk, nothing unusual between two strangers in the Upper Midwest. After giving (maybe a tad reluctantly) the Cliff’s Notes version of my life—the overseas living, the international school teaching, the mixed-nationality marriage—the topic changed to kids, as these conversations tend to do. Just the one, then?, she asked, nodding towards my daughter, who was mid-air, jumping off the swing.

Funnily enough, I wanted to say, that is the same thing I ask myself every day. Just not about family size.

“Did you hear that, Mom?” My daughter pulls me up from the chair on the beach. We walk towards the water’s edge, scanning the reeds, the shadow beyond the dock, and the darkening horizon until we spot the loon. She parts the reeds, claiming her space on the lake, steering a steady course across the water. Trailing behind her like a mini parade are her three chicks tethered to her by nothing but instinct.

They are a single, unsevered unit, moving through their world with simplicity and ease. My own tether is thin and frayed, pulled taut across an ocean, vibrating and creaking with the effort of holding two lives in one heart. Just the one, then?, the woman had innocently asked at the park. Yes, just the one, but I am fragmented, too. Did you know? I’m a dual-citizen of a life that is currently split between the hum of this life here and a complicated life 6,000 miles away.

One, two, three. My daughter counts the loon’s babies, her voice soft in the evening air. A boat motor rumbles across the lake, and the chicks vanish underwater, one after the other, then resurface a few feet away, still following her.

The whole scene is suddenly punctured by a buzzing in my back pocket. My husband is video calling, and my daughter and I retreat to the beach chairs to answer, anxious to tell him all about our day of boat rides, tubing, and roasting marshmallows.

The rhythm of my days here, in my original home—the home embedded in my genes—is measured in small tactile things, the number of dripping bathing suits hanging on the deck railing, the temperature of the water at noon, the grit of sand that clings to toes long after we have left the lake. My mom’s chocolate chip cookies. It’s small, and contained, and light, and easy. It is predictable. For a season, it is whole.

The rhythm of my life across the world, in my other home, however, is measured in the opposite: in the frustrating friction of borders, in counting the hours across time zones, in the sequence of three airplane rides, and in the thousands of miles stretched between a Midwest sunset and Middle East sunrise. It is a constant and exhausting pivot. It is a reminder of an injustice that feels both invisible and absolute.

Here I am, a bridge between the two worlds, trying to knit our family of three together over crackling, spotty video calls, while my husband remains tied to a geography that does not allow him to step across. I am granted the freedom of the sky, the ease of a strong passport, and reunions with family each summer, while he remains static, his own passport a heavier thing to carry, stamped with the wrong birthplace, fixed by policies that act as a cage.

My husband’s face lights up the screen, and my daughter launches into a story about taking the boat out to a sandbar earlier. I look beyond my phone back out to the water, and the loon is still there, her three chicks bobbing in the silver wake. They are effortless, so singular, so perfectly whole.

Yes, I do have just one child. It’s the honest answer, but a partial one. The lady at the park had seen me with my one child and perhaps assumed it was a lifestyle choice. Oh, you know, one of those “one and done” families. She had no way of knowing, of course, that stopping at one was not an easy decision. She had no way of knowing that we are a family divided, constantly pulling and constantly taut, standing with one foot on each continent, waiting for the day when the pieces of our lives are no longer scattered across a map.

Until then, I live in the stretch. I am the bridge. I am the tether, holding two halves of my heart together, trusting the effort is worth the eventual arrival.

So yes, it’s just the one. Just the one, while I try not to let the hunger of waiting consume me and steal the sweetness of today. Just the one, as I breathe in the air of this lake, honoring this life instead of racing toward a future I cannot yet touch, knowing that one day, the longing will end, and we will finally be whole.

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They attacked Iran.

My husband messages my phone from the back of the house. My daughter is next to me, teaching me how to draw a ladybug.

“Like this,” she says. “You draw the letter D first.”

What??? I pick up my phone and tap out a reply. Three question marks.

Woohoo, is all he sends back. I hear him moving around the back bedrooms, closing dresser drawers with freshly folded laundry.

“And then the letter C. Connect it—Mommy! Like this.” She tugs at my sleeve. “Mommy, are you watching?” I take the red marker from her hand, the scented one that smells like red velvet cake.

My phone buzzes.

It’s happening.

And another:

Finally.

I can already imagine the headlines, the comment sections forming in my mind, making me weary and apprehensive:
Stay out of it. We’ve done this before. It’s just a distraction. It never ends well. War should be avoided at all costs.

But somewhere else, under a flag they did not choose, children, parents, and grandparents shout, “Finally”. Finally, a crack in the wall. Finally, a chance at freedom.

My daughter presses the black marker—this one smells like caramel machiatto—against the red shell she has traced, carefully drawing spots into place.

But the comment section doesn’t know of the four decades of desperation Iranians have felt, of the forty-six years pressed like a thumb against the throat of its people, their own cries silenced, choked, and punished.

Destruction is not a shortcut to liberation. I know this. And peace does not arrive on the backs of missiles. And yet, two—now nearly three—generations have watched their country unravel, their freedoms stolen, and their loved ones massacred. After half a century, a crack in the sky is like breathing for the first time, like finally being heard, like a pulse of possibility that has been waiting decades to arrive.

“Do we need milk?” my husband shouts from the other room.

“I think I want to be Shrek for Halloween,” my daughter says.

No, we don’t, and Halloween is eight months away. I add black spots to my own ladybug.

“Insects always have six legs,” she tells me, certain of this small order. She frowns when the legs smear. She asks me to look on Amazon for a Shrek mask.

Six legs. Always six. She counts them with me. One, two, three.

My phone pings. Four, five, six.

“Mommy! Are you watching?” she asks again, more insistent this time. Tiny, wobbly wings are tucked beneath a rounded shell. Black spots are pressed onto the red wings, waiting to unfold into something that might fly.

She knows, doesn’t she? That my eyes are on more than the dots and lines she’s drawing.

They say if a ladybug lands on you, it brings good luck. Some even say it carries wishes on its wings. My daughter doesn’t know any of this, of course. She is just drawing something alive on paper, following each step, pressing the spots carefully onto the shell. Each line feels important. Each leg is precise. She colors her world small, exact, bright, as if she could keep it safe from everything else.

My husband swoops in just then with a blanket and wraps my daughter up like a Turkish döner, her smelly markers tipping from the basket, rolling off the table, and clattering to the floor. She shrieks and laughs as he carries her around the house.

“Mommy! Look! Are you watching?” her voice muffled from somewhere inside the blanket slung over my husband’s shoulder. He looks like a peddler or Santa Claus.

Freedom so close, he could taste it.

Inside, I hold the marker in one hand and my vibrating phone in the other: one world small and certain, one vast and unraveling. I finish my ladybug with six straight legs and cap the marker.

Yes. Yes, I am watching.

Outside, though, no one knows how many legs this will grow or which ones will survive.

When news breaks, it’s tempting to jump to hot takes. But the first voices to listen to are those living it, crying out, and affected most. Here’s a list of Iranian voices worth following.

@iraniandiasporacollective — Iranian Diaspora Collective, highlighting global Iranian voices and perspectives.
@taragrammy — Iranian-Canadian storyteller and activist amplifying voices from inside Iran.
@sepidehmoafi — Actor and storyteller offering cultural insight and reflections from an Iranian-American perspective.
@chaiandconversation — A creative space exploring Iranian culture, language, and the everyday humanity that doesn’t make headlines.
@roxanasaberi — Journalist and author with deep experience reporting from Iran and the Middle East.
@shallyzomorodi – Morning news anchor reporting on current events, including updates and perspectives on Iran.

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My 5-year-old daughter hums the tune to the Chicken Dance over and over from the back of the car on our way to school. From the driver’s seat, my husband tells me that the internet in Iran is finally up and working after over 200 hours of complete blackout. His cousin in his hometown messaged him on WhatsApp, saying he’s okay. His aunties are all safe. The death toll is said to surpass 12,000 Iranians. “But it’s way more than that,” my husband says.

My daughter asks to play the Chicken Dance over the speakers. I turn the radio knobs and connect my phone to the Bluetooth speaker. Earlier that morning, between shoving lunch boxes into backpacks and searching for the missing mate to a sneaker, I dumped dried kidney beans into a bowl of water for soup I’ll make later.

The day rolls on, and from the empty cushioned seats in the audience, I watch 4th graders rehearse for an upcoming winter music concert. I pull out my phone to send a quick grocery list to my husband and am met with a photo of a boy in a fuzzy blue bunny hat being detained by ICE agents, his face frozen and confused as he is put into a vehicle. He looks exactly like the kindergarten students I will teach later this week. He’s the same age as my daughter. The fourth graders change their formation on the squeaky risers, half of them putting recorders to their chins and the other half sitting down to xylophones and picking up wooden mallets.

During World War I, as Europe convulsed with violence and loss, Impressionist painter Claude Monet remained in his French village, painting the water lilies that floated on top of his garden pond. Light shifted across the pond, reflecting clouds and leaves in endless patterns. While the world outside struggled with brutality and despair, Monet tended to light, color, and reflection.

I upload a video of my outfit to Instagram stories, sandwiched between a post on a call for Christians to love and welcome the foreigner and a video compilation of ICE agents in Minneapolis violently pulling people out of cars, forcing people out of homes in just their underclothes and slippers in subzero weather.

I share a photo of my coffee cup and the book I’m reading, along with a breakdown of what has been happening in Iran, how protests have turned into a revolution, and how the government has met dissent with mass arrests, internet blackouts, and lethal force.

On the surface, very little happens in Monet’s piece, Water Lilies. There is no horizon line to orient the eye, no clear beginning or end. Sky dissolves into water; water dissolves into reflection. Lily pads drift, overlap, blur at the edges. Strokes thicken and thin, sometimes deliberate, sometimes almost hesitant, as if Monet were feeling his way forward rather than declaring anything with certainty. Color does most of the work here: bruised purples, milky blues, sudden greens, shocks of pinks and whites hovering just above the water’s surface. Nothing is fixed; everything is in motion.

What did the Church do when major atrocities raged across the world in years past? Where were the Christians, and what did they think? Did they know what was happening just beyond their doors? Did they care? Did they go about their daily lives as if nothing was happening? I contemplate asking ChatGPT these questions while writing lesson plans and wrapping up grading, but something about it feels too dystopian. I ask it to give me a dairy-free blueberry muffin recipe instead.

After school, my daughter and I play outside while the sun still hangs above the horizon. She picks up a shard of ice from a frozen puddle in her bare hand, marveling at it. Both our shadows stretch across the concrete in the late afternoon winter sun. We take some more pieces of ice and throw them to the ground, watching as they shatter and spin into a million tiny pieces. It feels good. We try to pick up the biggest piece we can without it breaking, digging the tips of our fingers into the ice, pulling, pulling. I take one shard and hold it up to the sun, its rays pushing through the cloudy jagged ice, sending fractured light all around.

In a 1914 letter, Monet admitted the weight of this choice to paint: “Yesterday I resumed work,” he wrote. “It’s the best way to avoid thinking of these sad times. All the same, I feel ashamed to think about my little researches into form and colour while so many people are suffering and dying…”

Back inside, I pour the soaked beans and a cup of lentils into a pot on the stove. We will eat āsh reshteh for dinner, one of the only ways I can think of to stand in solidarity with Iranians. It doesn’t feel enough.

From the living room, the TV shouts headlines in Farsi: shaky videos of gunfire, raids, and screaming leak into the kitchen. This is where my husband has been glued since the first week of January, watching his country turn on its people, but he switches over to a Persian children’s program once my daughter walks in. They sing along in Farsi to the theme song.

Stirring the soup, I get a notification on my phone. A former youth group leader DMs me on Instagram. We haven’t talked since I was a teenager. Without any greeting, the message fires back at my story about ICE detainments. It excuses and minimizes, repeating far-right talking points, a narrative twisted from the one being told by those on the ground in Minneapolis.

I say a quick prayer for grace before responding. As I stir parsley, tarragon, and coriander into the pot, I remember us high school girls poring over this leader’s photos from her mission trip to Ecuador years ago. I turn down the heat and taste for salt.

After the war ended, Monet offered Water Lilies as a gift to France, a memorial not of triumph but of peace, an offering of stillness and beauty after years of brutality. Installed in the Musée de l’Orangerie, in an oval room designed for immersion, the paintings surround the viewer with light, water, and slow time.

Later that night, I think about responding to that DM. The one with no hello. The one with the hot take from someone I had considered a spiritual mentor years ago. But I’m in the middle of a tickle fight with my daughter. We wipe tears from our eyes and continue to dissolve into giggles. Our bellies are full from the soup and hurt from laughing too hard. I pull the covers up to her chin, both of us out of breath.

After singing a campfire song still lodged in my brain from bible camp 25 years ago, I make the sign of the cross on her forehead. May the Lord bless you… My thumb makes a line down the middle. …And keep you… It crosses from one side to the other. We say the rest of the benediction together.

Author and poet Drew Jackson writes, “The world is on fire, as it always is. The world is still beautiful, as it always is.”

Do you feel it too? This strange, almost shameful feeling of tending to beauty while the world burns. How do we hold both? Were our hands even made to hold both?

I quietly close the bedroom door behind me, carrying an empty milk cup in one hand, and delete the DM. It isn’t worth it.

Monet’s paintings did not depict war, grief, or loss directly; instead, he attended obsessively to the light and to the way one thing holds the reflection of another.

I don’t know if we were made to carry so many things at once. But I do know that it is a spiritual practice to tend to what is small and luminous without turning away from what is burning. I know it is a spiritual practice to feed children, to make soup, to paint water and bless foreheads, even when—especially when—the world is loud and cruel.

Monet did not stop the war with his art, of course. Neither will my soup, my Instagram stories, nor my refusal to harden. But tenderness in itself is a form of resistance. It is a way of saying that brutality does not get the final word.

Welcome to “At the Edges of Advent.” Each Sunday leading up to Christmas, this will be a place to share stories from the margins and the little ways hope shows up when we least expect it. Nothing fancy. Just an honest attempt to notice God in overlooked places, ordinary moments, in-between spaces, and the areas where we often wrestle and hope at the same time.

So join me here each week as we look for just a little bit of light in the dark.

The Longest Night, the Smallest King

One of my favorite Christmas traditions is taking out all the Christmas and winter-themed children’s books that have been packed away for the better part of the year and, while my daughter sleeps, wrapping them one by one1. Each morning leading up to Christmas, my daughter will choose one from under the tree and unwrap it, eager to see which familiar but almost forgotten title she has unwrapped.

Last weekend, we pulled one of the books from the Christmas basket, a story about the nativity2. We cozied up on the couch, the book splayed open between the two of us. The sun had already begun to set this time of day, spreading like a purple bruise across the sky and casting stretched-out shadows along the wall.

As we turned the pages, my daughter found it perplexing that the King of the world was actually a little baby. A king!? That baby doesn’t look like a king! She pointed to the illustrations of a cherubic infant in a feeding trough surrounded by barn animals. It just looks like a baby!

Every December, my family celebrates a Persian holiday called Yalda Night, held on the winter solstice. Once the sun sets, families gather with food, tea, poetry, and music, staying awake together during the longest night of the year as a way of honoring the darkness while trusting that light will come.

Yalda is a way to pay tribute to the longest night, as celebrants know the next day will mark the slow walk towards longer daylight—victory over darkness.

In a time where so many of us are feeling world-weary, spiritually slumped, and more than a little cynical, it’s easy to think things will only get darker, only get worse, that the shimmer of light will keep drifting just out of reach.

I’m preaching to the choir when I say many of us are limping into the holiday season. We only have to read the headlines, sit with neighbors, or look at our own lives to see that grief creeps its way among the parties, the baking, and the gift wrapping.

But the longest night of the year tells us something different. To recognize and even celebrate the longest night means that this isn’t the end of the story. Light is near.

Love, it turns out, is not God fixing the darkness from a distance, but God stepping into it. “The Word became flesh and made his home among us” (John 1:14)—not arriving with spectacle or force, but as a baby, small enough to be held, vulnerable enough to need care.

The King of the world arrives without spectacle. No crown, no trumpets, no parade. Just a baby, born to an ordinary family from an ordinary village.

Christ comes not to rush us past the longest night, but to keep watch with us through it—Emmanuel, God with us—until the light begins, almost imperceptibly, to return.

So, weary world, may we rejoice in a God who is familiar with the darkness and yet invites us and fills us with divine hope. In all of life’s suffering and joy and mess, God is near. That much I know.

Victory of light over darkness is coming. We know this because we know the end of the story. This Christmas season, let us breathe a sigh of relief and wait for the coming Light.

On This Week’s Advent Table

• Scripture: “Love and faithfulness meet together; righteousness and peace kiss each other. Faithfulness springs forth from the earth, and righteousness looks down from heaven. The Lord will indeed give what is good, and our land will yield its harvest. Righteousness goes before him and prepares the way for his steps.” Psalm 85: 10-13

• Tiny Ritual: “Closing up” the house once the sun sets (*ahem* like, 4:30 PM these days). This means drawing the curtains, plugging in the Christmas tree, and lighting all the candles.

• Sweet Treat: Pomegranates! Tip: Remove the seeds while the whole pomegranate is submerged in a big bowl of water. The best way to prevent ruby red splatters all over the kitchen.

• Music: Sufjan Stevens - Once In Royal David's City (or really any song on this album)

• Resource: Biola University’s Advent Project. I come back to this one every year. The art, the prayers, and the reflections remind me of what and who we are waiting for.

A Blessing for the End of Advent

As Advent draws to a close,
may we carry with us the truth that God has been near all along.

Near in the waiting.
Near in the ache.
Near in the little sparks we almost missed.

May love meet us at the edges
of our strength,
our certainty,
our ordinary days.

Light has won.
Christ has come.
God is near.

Merry Christmas,

Welcome to “At the Edges of Advent.” Each Sunday leading up to Christmas, this will be a place to share stories from the margins and the little ways hope shows up when we least expect it. Nothing fancy. Just an honest attempt to notice God in overlooked places, ordinary moments, in-between spaces, and the areas where we often wrestle and hope at the same time.

So join me here each week as we look for just a little bit of light in the dark.

Shepherds, Sparks, and Surprising Joy

Years ago, back in toddler land, I sat with a friend in my living room. COVID regulations had just lightened, and we were all navigating how to safely host and socialize again. Over cups of coffee and my then 1.5 year old not-so-stealthily swiping chocolates from the serving dish, my friend asked me a question I wasn’t quite prepared for.

“What are the little sparks in your life right now?”

Her words, though simple enough, stopped me mid-toddler wrangling. I searched for something shiny to offer in response, some tidy, cheerful answer. All I could see, though, were the heavier things I’d been carrying: the uncertainty, the homesickness, the ache of being far from family, the longing that sharply threads itself through our Decembers every year.

“The big sparks are nice,” she went on to explain, graciously saving me from having to answer, “but for me it’s the little sparks that keep me going.”

The truth is, I’m always waiting for the big sparks: that full-circle moment, the years of tired prayers finally answered, the instant when everything aligns, and we can finally exhale. But as I get older, I see that joy is rarely a big spotlight moment. More often, it flickers in tiny, ordinary ways, right in the middle of the messy corners of life.

This week, as we light the third candle, we remember that the angels didn’t appear to the powerful or the put-together and perfect. They appeared to weary field workers pulling night shifts. They sang their great announcement into the darkness to people living ordinary, unremarkable lives.

But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people.” - Luke 2:10

Joy comes to the tired, the overlooked, to those who feel like they have little to offer.

And if you’re reading this and thinking, I don’t feel joy at all right now, that’s okay. Some Christmases don’t feel spark-filled. Some don’t resemble “the good old days” at all. I know that feeling well.

Everyone has heavy things they’re carrying on their shoulders. Some burdens are visible, and some are private. There is so much hard in the world. And some of it lives very close to home.

My own life often feels uncertain. The broken pieces I keep hoping will connect seem to drift farther apart instead. On days like that, I need to go looking for those little sparks just to keep me afloat: a good cup of coffee! Funny things my 5-year-old says! Soup on the stove! These little mercies don’t fix everything, but they do keep my head above the water.

Joy is not the absence of sorrow. Joy is God slipping light into the cracks. Not in a palace but in a barn, not in a sanctuary but in a shepherd’s field, not through strength and certainty, but through vulnerability and humility.

Life, as it turns out, is a strange medley of sorrow and sweetness, ache and awe, and darkness and dawn all braided together. The good news, though, is that joy is born not from what we bring to God, but from what God brings to us: love dwelling among us.

This is the heart of joy this season. God does not stay distant from our ache. God does not wait for us to get our stuff together before drawing close. God comes as a baby, choosing to make a home with us right where we are. Holy and humble.

On This Week’s Advent Table

• Scripture: And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night. An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people. Today in the town of David, a Savior has been born to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord. This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger. - Luke 2:8-12

• Tiny Ritual: Setting the timer for 4 PM every day, and wherever I am and whatever I’m doing, stopping when it goes off to pause and notice the moment. A small way to practice presence and gratefulness.

• Sweet Treat: A stovetop chai mix gifted by a friend. Simmering spices makes the whole house smell so cozy.

• Music: The Choir Room & Dwan Hill - “Silent Night (The Choir Room Version)1

• Prayer: (Repeating as needed, letting the words sink in with each breath, imagining the angels’ song reaching the fields, bringing joy into the middle of the night.)

  • Inhale: “Christ our Savior is here,”

  • Exhale: “working in the ordinary, in the messy, in the now.”

A Poem:

A reminder that joy isn’t meant to be small or scarce. Even in everyday, in-between moments, it is full and abundant, something to notice, savor, and let sink in.

Don’t Hesitate by Mary Oliver

If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it.
There are plenty of lives and whole towns destroyed or about to be.
We are not wise, and not very often kind.
And much can never be redeemed.
Still, life has some possibility left.
Perhaps this is its way of fighting back, that sometimes something happens better than all the riches or power in the world.
It could be anything, but very likely you notice it in the instant when love begins.
Anyway, that’s often the case.
Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid of its plenty.
Joy is not made to be a crumb.

Until next week. May the coming Light find you kindly.

Welcome to “At the Edges of Advent.” Each Sunday leading up to Christmas, this will be a place to share stories from the margins and the little ways hope shows up when we least expect it. Nothing fancy. Just an honest attempt to notice God in overlooked places, ordinary moments, in-between spaces, and the areas where we often wrestle and hope at the same time.

So join me here each week as we look for just a little bit of light in the dark.

For Us in the In-Between

Last summer, when visiting the United States., I took my daughter to the playground in my parents’ neighborhood. I followed her around as she jumped off of platforms, attempted the monkey bars, and slid down the roller slide, shouting “Mom! Watch!” on repeat (as is the sacred duty of all five-year-olds).

Partway through the morning, a local Mommy-and-Me type group began to gather, women with iced coffees in hand, babies strapped to their chests, toddlers zigzagging in every direction. At the edge of the playground, I watched them as they chatted, wiped noses, quelled tears, steadied wobbly legs, and exchanged tired smiles.

But then the strangest sense of deja vu hit me. I’ve stood in this exact same scene 6,000 miles away. At the edge of Turkish playgrounds, I’ve watched Turkish mothers tend, teach, redirect, and comfort. I’ve studied the little cultural details: how they call out to their kids, which snacks they pull from their bags, the park toys they share, trying to learn the unspoken rhythms of their language of motherhood.

I don’t fully belong in either picture. I don’t know what it’s like to mother in the U.S. And I’m not a Turkish mom, despite living there for a decade. I’m hovering somewhere over both worlds, learning new cues, absorbing new norms, translating myself across two worlds that mirror each other and yet don’t quite claim me.

I’m raising my child in a place that isn’t fully mine, building a life in the space between identities, longing for a place where all the pieces settle and fit.

I don’t think you have to be an expat to know this feeling; anyone carrying hidden burdens or balancing between what is hoped for and what is still unfolding knows the ache of being “not quite home.”

Mary understood this kind of in-between, too. A Nazareth girl giving birth in Bethlehem, a new mother fleeing to Egypt as a refugee, a family on the move, adapting, negotiating identity, carrying God with her into a life she didn’t plan.

Mary knew what it was to navigate a world that felt unstable and unjust, a world where the powerful made decisions that harmed the vulnerable, a world not yet as it should be.

And we know this world, too. The headlines feel heavier every day. Families are displaced, communities are divided, and refugees and immigrants are met with suspicion and hostility instead of welcome.

Peace feels like a far-off dream.

Advent is the season where we name the ache of not being fully home and the longing for belonging, for rootedness, for safety, for a world set right.

It is here, in these unsettled places, that God’s peace shows up. Not the polished kind where everything finally makes sense, but the kind that hums beneath the chaos. Peace that coexists with ache. Peace that settles in our hearts long before it settles in our circumstances. Peace Jesus carries into our uprooted, shifting, and unfinished lives.

As we light the second candle of Advent this week, let us remember that Heavenly Peace comes to the displaced, the weary, the in-between. God is there, turning the ground beneath our feet into something holy.

On This Week’s Advent Table

• Scripture: For to us a child is born, to us a son is given… and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. - Isaiah 9:6

• Books: Continuing our tradition of unwrapping one Christmas book each morning (after being stored away for 10 months). A few favorites:

  • Fletcher and the Snowflake Christmas — Julia Rawlinson

  • A Very Noisy Christmas — Tim Thornborough

  • Little Red Sleigh — Erin Guendelsberger

• Tiny Ritual: Taking an actual open mug of hot coffee outside and sipping while my daughter plays.

• Music: O Come, All You Unfaithful — Sovereign Grace Music

• Prayer: “God, let your peace settle here, even before my circumstances do.”

Peace Practices:

• Try a “counterweight” practice inspired by : each day, jot down the most unsettling or disheartening headline you’ve read (it’s important to name the heavy and hard!), then write one small way you can bring peace into your family’s, your neighbor’s, or your own day.

• Spend a few minutes with scripture this week, noticing passages that lift the foreigner, the poor, the marginalized, or the outsider1. Reflect on how these verses remind you that God’s peace often shows up among the vulnerable and the overlooked, and consider how you might carry that peace into your own life or community.

• Read Isaiah 26:3 or John 14:27. Where do you feel “between worlds” right now? And how might God be offering peace right there in the in-between?

Until next week. May the coming Light find you kindly.

Welcome to “At the Edges of Advent.” Each Sunday leading up to Christmas, this will be a place to share stories from the margins and the little ways hope shows up when we least expect it. Nothing fancy. Just an honest attempt to notice God in overlooked places, ordinary moments, in-between spaces, and the areas where we often wrestle and hope at the same time.

So join me here each week as we look for just a little bit of light in the dark.

Hope in the Margins (and Minecraft)

If you’ve ever worked in a school, you know the job rarely stays neatly confined inside your four classroom walls. Most days, I’m running on coffee breath, paint water splashed on my sleeves (what kind of art teacher wears white on paint day??), and oil pastels under my fingernails. One moment I’m frantically rinsing out paint palettes in the sink; the next I’m weaving through the playground during afternoon recess or tugging on my coat for bus duty.

Last week, after hustling my last class out my door and over to their buses before Thanksgiving break, a line of 2nd graders trudged past me. Their backpacks were slumped over their shoulders, jackets half-falling from their arms, sleeves dragging along the pavement. One student, whom I had just taught a period earlier, called out, “Mrs. B.! You’re like Enderman. You are everywhere!”

Cue me googling what the heck an Enderman is and whether I should be offended or flattered. For the unenlightened, Endermen are fast, teleporting Minecraft creatures who appear in unexpected places. So… I’m choosing to take it as flattery? (#themoreyouknow).

The whole Enderman thing unexpectedly nudged me into the Advent season, not because I can actually be in two places at once (goodness knows I try!) but because it brushed up against something true about being human. So much of our lives is spent stretched between places, needs, responsibilities, and longings.

Most days, we’re trying to live in two worlds at once: the things we carry and the things we wish we could set down, the people we love who are near and the ones who feel impossibly far, the life right in front of us and the life we quietly ache for.

And sometimes the gap between those two worlds feels like the longest stretch.

Advent is a season shaped by that in-between place, that kind of longing, waiting, and hoping. It’s the ancient ache for God to draw close, for light to meet us in the dark, and for hope to take root right in the very places that feel unfinished, unresolved, or unseen.

This week, may we keep our eyes open, because hope didn’t enter the world with fanfare, but in a manger, in a forgotten corner, in a backwater town, to people no one expected.

Hope often shows up at the edges, in the ordinary moments we rush past. So this Advent season, let’s keep our eyes open. Hope has a way of appearing right where we didn’t think to look.

On This Week’s Advent Table

• Scripture: “I wait for the Lord, my whole being waits, and in his word I put my hope.” - Psalm 130:5

• Tiny Ritual: Turning on the Christmas tree lights right away in the mornings, before any other lights are turned on. Pairs best with coffee, a splash of milk, and a few quiet minutes to breathe before everyone else is up.

• Quote: “Even when the world closes its doors, God keeps moving toward the margins—reminding us that hope is still on the move.”

• Sweet Treat: Gingerbread cut-out cookies topped with cream cheese frosting and the fun seasonal sprinkles from America. (Ration sprinkles to last through the winter.)

• Music: Instrumental Christmas playlists (not quite ready for a full-on dive into the Big Christmas Classics).

A Blessing

May you notice the little things this week:
the smell of coffee in the morning
the soft glow of lights in a dim room
the laughter that sneaks up on you.

May these tiny sparks of hope
remind you that God is moving in every hidden corner of your life
just as Christ came to us in a manger
in an unexpected place
bringing light to a darkened world.

Until next week. May the coming Light find you kindly.

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My five-year-old daughter presses objects into my open palm: gem-colored pebbles, a fluted-edged bottle cap, and a black-and-white feather from a bird I can’t name.

We hunt together, our heads bent towards the ground, searching for anything that could be deemed treasure. Sometimes it’s a gum wrapper, still sticky with sugar, and I work to hide my disgust. Other times, it’s a shard of jade-green glass she calls a diamond. These found objects pressed into my palm mark the contours of a terrain I’m still learning to navigate.

She runs to me now, her words ricocheting off the concrete courtyard of the neighborhood park. She shoves a dirty sticker into my hand. “Don’t drop it, remember!” she shouts over her shoulder. She’s off again, light and free, while I stand holding her treasures.

How could I forget? I want to say to her. I am Ariel, with gadgets and gizmos a-plenty, carrying a collection of things from a world I’m only half a part of. By the time we go home, my jacket pocket is weighted down with her findings.

This habit of collecting little treasures wherever we go isn’t new for us. I have rows and rows of photos on my camera roll of both of our outstretched hands holding tiny discoveries over the years. The evidence of it always finds its way into our home: a jagged rock clanking around in the washing machine, a dead leaf crumpled into a thousand pieces at the bottom of my purse. They mix with the artifacts of my own days: receipts from the local market, apartment keys, coins from a country I never meant to call home.

I didn’t ask to hold this either, this life abroad. I say it to myself whenever we miss a milestone back home, whenever a simple errand turns into a maddening maze of extra steps, whenever we sit inside crowded immigration offices, hoping this host country will let us stay another year. It has been a decade of me hefting on the title of Expat, clawing at my neck and sleeves, desperate to make an ill-sized coat fit.

What was supposed to be an adventurous placeholder in my life, a mere footnote in a larger narrative, has stretched into a major act of a story I didn’t know I’d be living. I have a husband now, and a child who cannot answer when someone asks, “Where are you from?” She is a Third Culture Kid, raised oceans away from grandparents and cousins. I carry the ache of that, for her and for myself.

Sometimes I imagine what it would look like if I had spent these last eleven years in the US instead. If my daughter’s pockets were filled with acorns from the same oak trees I grew up climbing and rocks from my parents’ garden bed. If she handed me treasures that could be shown proudly to cousins at Thanksgiving. If family members could watch her grow through something more than snapshots and video calls.

What sort of mother would I be, and what would I be carrying? Would it be any lighter? Any easier?

If I had stayed in one place, who would I have become?

But imagining another version of my life doesn’t change the one unfolding here, in this language, in this place, with this distance.

I am a mother here.

Still, I sometimes wonder—are my hands big enough for this life? Are they strong enough to hold the ache and the beauty, the distance and the belonging, the home I left and the one I built?

When my daughter asks me questions I can’t answer, like “Where am I from?” I stumble. I want to give her a neat reply that roots her firmly in the world, but I can only offer pieces.

And then there is my husband. His story is not mine to tell, not fully. It lives in our home, in ways we measure safety and the careful choices we have to make. He knows what it is to lose a home country, to live with an office drawer stuffed with papers that prove you belong, but only conditionally. He carries the weight of being marked by the wrong skin color, a certain accent, and a hard-to-pronounce name.

I watch the way our daughter studies him, carefully and shyly mimicking words and phrases in his heart language. I see her skin darken in the summer sun, see her lap up stories from his childhood in a faraway place, and I know she carries that weight too, even if she doesn’t yet feel its full gravity.

From thousands of miles away, I scroll through headlines: ICE raids in the night, deportations, families split apart. In grammatical errors and all caps, the comment sections cheer at the country’s direction. It feels disconcerting and alienating to watch my passport country hardened into something narrower than I remembered. My family once dreamed of being able to build a life there, jumping through the myriad of hoops demanded of us, only to be left on permanent hold.

I think about the families whose stories make the news. How the fear, the waiting, the ache to belong somewhere without question are not so different from ours. We are birds with clipped wings, flying in circles around a home we cannot reach.

When my daughter and I come back inside, our cheeks red, noses runny from the autumn chill, she takes her treasures from my pocket and deposits them on the table. She counts them, reciting the story of where she found each one exactly. She rummages through drawers until she finds a roll of clear tape and begins fashioning popsicle sticks, bottle caps, twigs, and pebbles into what she calls sculptures. They are lopsided creations, each its own small world. And she is a cartographer stitching together a map of a land that doesn’t exist.

These sculptures were created from objects that were ordinary to me but extraordinary to her. They are a little crude, a little wobbly, and made of what others tossed away. They are a lot like our life, cobbled from pieces we didn’t ask to carry, held together with grit and hope. It’s a patchwork of places we didn’t choose, griefs we didn’t ask to bear, identities we didn’t ask to claim. It’s all a little wobbly, sure, but it is ours—and my daughter calls it art.

We’re back outside again the next day. This time, she brings with her an orange pumpkin-shaped bucket, the kind meant for trick-or-treating. The plastic bucket was inherited from another expat family, a relic of someone else’s effort to make this place feel a little more like home. An unfamiliar child’s name is scrawled in black Sharpie on the bottom.

My daughter tells me she’s putting her treasures in here today, implying my hands are not needed. She drops in red winter berries plucked from their branches, a balled-up string, and more pebbles. I watch her, the bucket bouncing against her knees, her breath frosty in the cold air.

She is my Third Culture Kid with her found treasures. She is a mosaic stitched from difficult and beautiful scraps from everywhere. She is both the proof and the promise of the life we’ve built.

So I let her carry these found treasures. This is what mothers do. We hold things for a while, until the ones we love can carry them on their own. And in watching her, I feel something like gratitude—for the fragments and the mosaics, for the stories we are making here together.

This is how I learn, too: to empty my hands, to travel a little lighter, and to make room to hold the weight, the wonder, and whatever comes next.

Photo by Amber Kipp on Unsplash

The In-Between Season

Spring has arrived in full force here in Turkey. The trees are blooming, the temperatures are climbing, and nature seems eager to shake off the last remnants of winter. The other day, I saw something remarkable—a pine tree’s cones making soft, popping noises as they cracked open in the sudden warmth. It was as if they were sighing in relief, stretching toward the light. Winter was finally over!

But, on the other side of the world, to another place I call ‘home’ in the Upper Midwest, spring still feels like a distant hope. It’s that in-between season, not quite winter, but not yet spring. Everything is a little brown and a little gray, the ground muddy, the skies cloudy. We all know the light is coming, but when?

Maybe you feel like you're in that in-between season, not just in nature, but in life. Prayers seem unanswered, clarity feels far away, and every shaking step forward is uncertain. The world itself feels weary, groaning under the weight of war, division, and suffering. When will the light finally break through?

If you find yourself in this waiting, take heart: God is still at work. Even when we can’t see it, even when everything feels lifeless, God is preparing something new. The warmth will return, the buds will bloom, and the light will break through in perfect timing.

"The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it." — John 1:5

May we cling to this truth in every season. Spring will come. And more than that, our hope is certain, unwavering, and forever bright.

…Of the Month

Book of the Month: The God of the Woods by Liz Moore

Set in the 1970s, The God of the Woods is a literary thriller about a teenage girl’s disappearance at a summer camp, and the secrets that unfold as people start to dig into the past. It’s one of those books that pulls you in with its suspense, but what got me was how Moore blends that with complex, real characters. I couldn’t put it down, but it’s also the kind of book that sticks with you after you finish. It’s unsettling, but in the best way. Worth reading if you’re into dark, thoughtful thrillers (*raises hand* me!).

Recipe of the Month: Lemon Bars

With spring finally here, I’ve been craving fresh, bright flavors: lemons, strawberries, mint, blueberries. I was planning on making blueberry cake for a Nowruz party, but alas, the grocery store was out of blueberries (such is life overseas). So I decided to make lemon bars. They ended up being the perfect balance of tart and sweet. If you’re looking for something light and refreshing, this one’s worth trying.

Playlist of the Month

I love having this playlist on in the background while I read, clean, or even while my students work. It’s mellow and just cozy enough to make everything feel a little more relaxed. Yes, the AI-generated scene that goes with it is maybe a little cheesy (cringe, as the kids say), but I can’t help but enjoy it. Perfect for those moments where you just need to chill (of which I need many).

Little Joys List

• Sipping on a hot cup of coffee to power through the still-chilly morning recess duty.

• Taking advantage of having two slow cookers to make khoreshts (Persian stews) over the weekends. Then freezing them to enjoy throughout our busy week.

• Watching daffodils pop up outside our apartment building and the plum tree bloom at school. Oooh, and hearing the mourning doves coo. Some of my springtime favorites.

• Complementary chai. It’s Eid here, marking the end of Ramadan, and every business seems to celebrate by handing out free cups of tea.

• My daughter’s drawings littering the house. She’s moved on from potato people, as adorable as that phase was, and is now onto drawing unicorns and Bluey and slides and the word “poop” written over and over.

What about you? What little thing has been bringing you joy this month?
I’d love to hear about it! Reply and let me know what small moment has reminded you of hope lately.

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My daughter stretches as tall as she can, her back flat against the living room wall. Her hair is pulled into two French braids. A neon band-aid is slapped across her scrapped knee. A smear of purple marker has somehow made its way under her nose. I am beside her. The backs of our heels press up against the baseboard. We stand rigid, eyes forward. She puts her splayed hand on top of her head, her fingers poking just below my elbow. 

Here. I’m right here on you, she says, stepping away from the wall, body relaxing. On the cusp of turning four, my daughter is eager to keep growing, to move up in shoe and pant sizes. She tells me she’ll grow taller than me, which will probably be true at the rate she’s going (although surpassing my five-foot-two self won’t be so difficult).

She says when she turns 100 years old she’ll be as tall as the sky. 

//

There’s a Persian children’s story my husband likes to tell my daughter. Switching between English and Farsi, he recounts the dramatic tale: Once, a mother goat left her baby goats at home and warned them not to let the wolf into their house. Despite this, the sly wolf managed to deceive the baby goats by disguising himself as their mother and devouring all but one of them.

(At this point in the story, I give a sideways look to my daughter, wondering if this is all too much for her, a little too violent and scary. But she is enraptured, parroting my husband’s words to me, line by line, as if I’m not in the room with them listening to the same story.)

When the mother goat returned to find her lone surviving child hiding and the carnage the attacker left in his wake, she was furious. She sought help from the village knife grinder to sharpen her horns. Then the mother goat launched a vicious attack on the wolf, ripping open the beast’s belly with her newly-sharpened horns and freeing her baby goats. 

//

After measuring ourselves, my daughter and I walk to the neighborhood basketball court. It’s early enough that the big kids haven’t gotten out of school yet and haven’t come racing to the park with their soccer balls, speed, and pent-up energy. She pushes herself forward on her scooter, begging me to chase her around the court. It’s another ordinary late afternoon—purgatory time, where the clock inches towards 5 PM. Bedtime will be in a couple of hours. A game of tickle monster, two books, a song, and a prayer.

I take a photo of our two shadows stretching across the basketball court, the camera catching the chain link fence behind us. Her arm rests casually on the handles of her scooter. Our silhouetted bodies meld into one shape because we are holding hands. The shadow from the sun eliminates the details, making it look like we are one connected form. 

//

We need to stop by the market for tonight’s dinner. The only paved road runs by a house with two large, ferocious dogs who will bark and snarl at each passerby. They’ll lunge forward, but their leashes will halt their momentum, causing them to jerk back from the chain link fence.  

My daughter knows this. She anticipates the likelihood of encountering the dogs on the way to the market. Her steps begin to slow and drag across the black pavement. Her hand finds mine. 

Sing the song, she says, twisting half of herself behind me. 

The words to You Are My Sunshine are wobbly. The tune is messy. I am out of breath trying to sing and walk up the hill at the same time. It’s the song my mom sang to me as a young girl. It’s the song I sang in the shower as my belly grew rounder and rounder. It's the song that gives her the courage to keep walking. 

The dogs bark and growl somewhere behind the fence, but we don’t see them. We pass the house. The song ends. I feel her hand relax in mine.

//

There’s a theory that suggests newborns experience themselves and their mothers as a single unit, with no clear boundary between them. The infant’s sense of security and self are deeply intertwined with the mother’s presence. 

I get a pit in my stomach for all the hurt my daughter will inevitably experience in her life: her first disappointment, her first ending of a friendship, her first heartbreak, and her first loss. There will be a time when I cannot sharpen my horns and free her from the belly of the beast. 

She will keep growing—past my elbow and then above me, perhaps even to the sky. One day, our silhouettes will divide into two distinct forms. And her hand once fused to mine will hold itself out to the world.

But I’ll consider it a success if, not only surpassing my height, my daughter outdoes my kindness, tops my bravery, and outshines my faith. I can’t protect her from every loss and disappointment, but I can show her how to sing a song of hope in the face of danger.

There’ll be a time for my daughter to reach towards the sky. But for now, her hand is in mine. For just a bit longer, our shadows are connected.

This post is part of a blog hop with Exhale—an online community of women pursuing creativity alongside motherhood, led by the writing team behind Coffee + Crumbs. Click here to view the next post in the series "Silhouette."

Three Things and Three More is an every-other-month(ish) newsletter with three bite-sized (probably unrelated) essays and three quick (also probably unrelated) things I want to share with you.

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Three Things

1. What I Made (While Not Making Words)

a double chocolate quick-bread/ plans for coffee with a friend that turned into 3 PM drinks/ room in my home to have dinner with neighbors/ solo walks around the neighborhood after my daughter went to bed/ art alongside her/ many mistakes speaking a foreign language/ renewed efforts to adequately hydrate/ a quick trip to the sea

2. To Be Blessed

To be blessed said the woman at the bus stop
Her face tilted toward the sun
Is to always find the light
To crane your neck, even if it hurts
To let the warmth wash over you

To be blessed said the crocus outside my door
Is to push your fragile limbs out of the dirt
Before everyone else
It’s to dare to show your buttery petals
Even when ice and frost still threaten to consume

To be blessed said the bumble bee down in the grass
Is to dance on the head of a dandelion
Drinking up the sweetness of your life
Gathering all that you can carry
In your weary-laden arms1

3. Then the Poppies

First came the usuals: the dandelions, the red clover, the wild daffodils. All harbingers of the coming season. But then one morning: the red poppies, making a show as they exploded out of their buds, making weary eyes rest on something beautiful amidst all the gray.

I don’t know how to walk my family through all the muck and mud of this world, all the hard and sharp corners. But I know I want to take my daughter’s face in my hands and memorize every line and dot and sparkle and giggle. I know I want to look back on this moment awash with gratefulness for the gifts I have been given in this life.

French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal said to always carry beauty with you. If you can tuck a little slice of something beautiful into the creases of your heart, something small and simple, something easy to reach, something you can fish out now and again whenever it’s needed, to behold and admire, well, then I think it’ll get you through a lot of darkness.

The poppies, her face, the warming sun, the promise of better days—all small, beautiful things I will carry.

And Three More

1. One Book I’m Reading

After tackling the behemoth Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver last month, I needed something much smaller, lighter, and, well, a little more hopeful. Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan fits the bill. Small Irish town? The Christmas season? 70 pages? What more could a person ask for? I wasn’t familiar with Keegan’s work until picking this up on a whim last month and now I never want to read anything else.

2. One Meal I’m Making

The aforementioned double chocolate quick bread. We’re in that strange part of the year where the weather is warming up outside but we’re not quite ready to turn off the oven. Quick breads come in handy here. This one is dense and chocolatey (add some coffee to the wet ingredients!) and perfect for an afternoon pick-me-up. I think I used the wrong-sized loaf pan because the batter came right to the very top, but it ended up being perfect.

3. One thing I want you to know

I don’t actually have one thing to tell you. We’re all limping towards the end-of-the-school-year finish line, right? Waiting for warmer days and more free schedules. I’m in the trenches of taking online courses to become teacher-certified (!) and also just navigating all the wobbly steps of uncertainty my family is going through. Life is life-ing (to quote my writer friend, ).

So I’ll leave you with one of my favorite little gems here on Substack:


The Collared Dove. One of my favorite sounds.

Shriek of the Week

Shriek of the Week: Collared Dove

Coo-COO-coo, coo-COO-coo Pulsing in through an open window, or perhaps piped in down a chimney, the song of the collared dove will be familiar to many of us…

Listen now

3 years ago · 29 likes · 11 comments · Charlie from Birdsong Academy

What have you been making recently? What has been lifting your wings in your life? Join me in stopping to notice the things we make in the month ahead that are in turn making us.

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I’m standing at the counter, cutting the crust off a peanut butter jelly sandwich, lost in the thoughts that plague a mother: Do we have enough pull-ups? Is the world getting better or worse? Are we out of milk? What will happen in the next five, ten years?

Behind me, with a mouthful of orange slices, my three-and-a-half-year-old asks me what a ‘refugee’ is.

Despite the abruptness of that question, it’s an easy one, considering how that word affects our family. The answer is solid, an easily definable thing. I wipe my hands on the kitchen towel and tell her in the simplest way I know how, leaving her dad out of the response this time. One day we’ll share the stories. One day we’ll tell her the sacrifices he made, the barriers he hurtled. For now, though, my one-sentence answer is enough for her. She nods and goes back to eating the orange.

Earlier that morning, when the sun was just starting to stretch herself above the horizon, I watched a solitary maintenance worker walk across the parking lot attempting to balance a large orange traffic cone on the tips of his splayed fingers. One arm was outstretched in front of him, the cone balancing and teetering, his other arm held out to the side for counterbalance. He laughed to himself and caught the cone in his arms.

Out the kitchen window, magpies hopped with delicate precision across the weathered wooden poles that support the growing evergreen saplings. It was a little bit of nature in our concrete jungle, providing a respite from all the gray and hardness. The birds picked their breakfast from the ground and chattered and squawked.

Two women briskly walked by, their strides matching up perfectly. Both right legs stepped forward at the same time. Then both left legs followed. The synchronized stepping was like a dance and beautiful in its ordinary.

That afternoon, I waited at the bus stop. A woman came a couple of minutes later. No sooner had she sat down on the metal bench than she popped back up and walked a few paces out from under the awning. I watched her tilt her face to the sky and drink in the sun that was shining between parted clouds, eyes closed, a smile spreading across her face.

It’s strong today, an older man said to her behind me, nodding toward the sky. His voice was muffled behind his paper mask, but I saw the corner of his eyes crinkle as he looked at my daughter, who was jumping from puddle to puddle in the shade. He recited a common blessing to her. His hands pantomimed tossing a ball as he spoke it out, and I imagined the words moving through the warm air and settling over her.

My daughter thinks it’s possible to control your dreams. Before I left her room at bedtime, she asked me what I’d be dreaming about that night. I used to try to correct her, tell her you can’t actually decide beforehand what dreams you’ll have, that you have no power over them. But all attempts were futile. She forged on, telling me she would dream about strawberry cupcakes or riding on unicorns under rainbows. So I told her that I’d dream about those things too, that I’d meet her there, under the rainbow.

Maybe she’s right. Maybe you can set out to decide what you’ll dream about, to visualize the future first as your head hits the pillow.

Maybe we do have more power than we think.

I guess all this to say is that I refuse to lose sight of hope, even while keeping an eye on the atrocities of the world. Through gritted teeth, you’ve got to rip some joy out of the tightly clenched fists of the universe. You’ve got to. Because they are there—a thousand glimmers of joy beneath the mire holding us in place—these tiny extraordinary glories.

If I can do that, to take my share of joy, to dream about it first and keep it from slipping through my fingers, the world will feel like something I can still manage to hold.

Three Things and Three More is an every-other-month(ish) newsletter with three bite-sized (probably unrelated) essays and three quick (also probably unrelated) things I want to share with you.

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Three Things

1. Take Your Time

Seriously. Here, take it.
Your time isn’t mine to hold.
See how solid it feels?
You can hold it. It’s not going to slip and slide out of your hands.
But if you feel like it might, put it in your pocket where it belongs.
Have it stay put.
Look! Your pocket is bulging! You can barely get the zipper closed.
That’s because you’ve got plenty of it.
Don’t rush.
It’s all there, everything you need.
You’ve got time.

2. Belly Laughs

The step after reading books in our bedtime routine and before saying our prayers, I find myself in the middle of a tickle fight—two little hands jab at my shoulders and arms. I reach under the blankets and tickle her middle. She’s still wearing Christmas pajamas a size too small, a red shirt that says “Merry Everything”, the capital ‘E’ delightfully donning a green Santa hat, and pants patterned with gingerbread men, reindeer, and snowflakes, the bottoms of which hang above her ankles. My whoops and cries produce a ribbon of belly laughs from her, our faces inches apart. She kicks her legs frantically, the fleece blankets twisting around her. The more she laughs, the more I do.

I feel a shot of oxytocin or endorphins or whatever those happy chemicals release in my brain and enter my bloodstream, and I am overwhelmed with the thought of wanting to protect her from every bad thing. Her eyes are crinkled and squeezed shut, her laugh a most beautiful and genuine sound. She can hardly catch a breath between tickles and our laughing.

I want her to feel this happy always, no matter what life throws her way. And I want life to throw nothing but good and easy things her way. Can it make an exception for her? Can she stay like this? We grow quiet as I try to transition us to our prayers, but then our eyes meet, and we dissolve into deep belly laughs once more. 

3. Longing

noun

1. A strong desire, especially for something unattainable

   See also: desire, craving, ache

It feels like a rope tied around the heart, squeezing and pulling until the impossible dream comes pouring out, growing across the chest but always staying stuck inside.

It tastes bittersweet, leaving the mouth wanting more, unsatisfying, and hard to pin down the ingredients. Is that cinnamon I taste? No—vinegar? Maybe lemon?

It sounds like an echo across a courtyard, bouncing on the cool concrete, its laments rolling across the grass and landing somewhere in the shadows.

It is the color of the sea, all black and blue and gray swirling together and blending into the darkening line of the horizon.

And Three More

1. One Book I’m Reading

   

   I just finished Remarkably Bright Creatures, Shely Van Pelt’s debut novel. While I normally don’t love books that bounce around to different characters for each chapter, one of the narrators is a charming octopus. Marcellus is a Giant Pacific Octopus in captivity in an aquarium in the Pacific Northwest. His story is the thread that binds the three narratives together, and in my opinion, completely stole the show—and what’s not to love about that?

   
   “Tova wonders sometimes if it’s better that way, to have one’s tragedies clustered together, to make good use of the existing rawness. Get it over with in one shot. Tova knew there was a bottom to those depths of despair. Once your soul was soaked through with grief, any more simply ran off, overflowed, the way maple syrup on Saturday-morning pancakes always cascaded onto the table whenever Erik was allowed to pour it himself.”
   

2. One Meal I’m Making

   

   I made these orange cardamom muffins the other week when I had unexpected guests stop by. The perfect late-morning snack—not too sweet or heavy—and pairs perfectly with a cup of coffee. Next time I’ll double up on the spices.
   

3. One Thing I Want You to Know

   
   I usually run far and away from any TikTok trends and TikTok in general, but one trend I can get behind and am kind of obsessed with is “humans being humans”. There’s something sweet and sad and grounding watching little snippets of people living their lives in all their humanness. Here’s one and here’s another.

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He blows a kiss to her from across the living room, and she doesn’t know what to do with it at first. Curls still matted at her neck, her Disney princess blanket wrapped around her lap, and her empty milk cup on the end table. Morning light hasn’t quite made it through the windows on this side of the house, so yellow light from the floor lamp pools on the ground.

I point to the invisible kiss in the air in front of her—There it is! Catch it!— and pretend to grab it in my hands and plant it on her cheek. She’s starting to understand now, and he sends over another kiss—Oooh, it’s flying fast! And she grabs it. She sends a kiss back to him, which is mostly just her shooting her palm out like a superhero and puffing air through her mouth. He pretends to catch her kiss on the tops of his feet like a soccer ball and bounces it up again in the air. He opens the bottom of his shirt, catching the kiss as if it's stuck inside him.

//

“I wish I had a ponytail like that. I wish I had a strawberry dress. I wish I had a cupcake. I wish I had a puppy.”

Taking a break from the playground, my daughter starts a made-up game where we each take turns listing things we wish we had.

"It's your turn!" she says, placing a hand on my husband’s shoulder.

He opens his mouth to speak, but no words come out. He pauses for a moment before saying, "I wish I had a home, a place with roots." He tries to smile at the silly game, crinkles in the corners of his eyes begin to form then disappear.

It's one of those moments where he seems to leave us, like a balloon drifting away from a child's hand.

I pick up the game where it was dropped. "Hmm, I wish I had a cup of coffee!"

Suddenly, he is back with us on the park bench, the balloon popping or disappearing altogether.

"I wish I had... ice cream!" he exclaims, making an exaggerated shocked face. The mischievous glimmer in his eyes returns, and my daughter stares back, eagerly anticipating what he'll say next. Does he mean what she hopes he means? He nods, confirming her dreams are about to come true, and we get up from the bench in search of ice cream.

//

I crack open the last bedtime book, finally getting to the end of our long, drawn-out bedtime routine. My daughter is cozy and settled next to me in her bed, a blanket tucked tightly under each side of her, her beat-up crochet rabbit in one hand and a fuzzy baby blanket clutched in the other. Just as I am beginning to read the story, my husband comes breezing into the bedroom. I call him “Mr. Typhoon” in Farsi because, whenever he enters a room, it’s like a giant swirl of energy splashing over everything. 

Get up! Get up! He shouts excitedly, motioning with his hands for us to get out of bed. Look at the moon!

We push the covers back and clamor out of bed, dumping the book on the ground, always up to look at the moon.

We can see it before we open the door to the balcony: a big, full, bright yellow moon hanging so low in the sky that part of it is still tucked behind the bluffs. My daughter runs to the end of the balcony, eager to get as close to it as possible. “It’s a sun-moon!” she declares.

The three of us sit back on the rocking bench, taking in the full moon that has now fully risen over the bluffs, looking like a perfectly round dinner plate hanging in the sky.

The glow of the golden moon against a dark sky eases our minds a bit, for that moment at least. We don’t know where we’re going, but we’ll all be together.

This post is part of a blog hop with Exhale—an online community of women pursuing creativity alongside motherhood, led by the writing team behind Coffee + Crumbs. Click here to view the next post in the series "Ours".

Three Things and Three More is an every-other-month(ish) newsletter with three bitesized (probably unrelated) essays and three quick (also probably unrelated) things I want to share with you.

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Three Things

1. What’s in, What’s out for 2024

   In

   Seasonal fruits/Muting accounts/Leaving long voice messages/Poetry books/Saying hello first/Apologizing first/One bed, two blankets/Notes app/Grocery delivery/Printed recipes/Throwing around compliments/Chasing the light/Noticing/9 PM/Long-form writing/Slow starts
   
   Out

   Sad beige/Doomscrolling/Overthinking emoji usage/Microtrends/Grocery hauls/Imposter Syndrome/Yucking on yums/Rejecting help/Streaming subscriptions/Cottage cheese/Feeling behind/Decanting/Food blogs/Scrolling past bedtime/Butter boards/Hustling

   
   

2. Joy Like Cake
   If joy was something we could grip,

   we’d dig it from the ground,

   reach deep into the belly of the earth,

   and wipe away the dirt.

   We could hold it up to the weak rays of the sun,

   catch a glimmer,

   a rainbow prism.

   Keep it close.

   We could tuck it in our pocket,

   and reach back into the dirt in search of more.
   
   If joy was something we could see,

   It’d be the first light of the sun

   Just when we thought it might never come

   After the longest, darkest night.

   But—there it is.
   The faintest flicker on the horizon

   It’s arms reaching across the sky,

   Touching the valleys and caves

   Spilling its yellow glow
   
   If joy was something we could taste,

   we could roll around its crumbs

   like leftover cake between our palms.

   We could brush it onto our plates

   and press the bits between the prongs of our forks

   and lift it to our mouths

   and savor it on our tongues.

   We could pass the serving platter and knife to the next person.

   Here, have another. Please.

   There’s so much more.

   
   

3. Chasing the Light
   I’m in the kitchen washing the lettuce for tonight’s salad. It’s the longest night of the year, and the sun is already setting, the kitchen growing dimmer and dimmer. But I hear them in the living room. She’s asking for a specific song in Farsi, something about the rain is all I catch. The Bluetooth speaker connects, and the familiar beginning beats of the song start playing. I don’t see them. I’m patting the lettuce leaves dry with a tea towel. I’m wiping up the water droplets on the countertop. But I hear my husband’s voice. He’s singing to the song, words I don’t understand, but his voice is loud and clear. I hear tiny scuffles of tiny feet. I don’t see her, but I know my daughter is dancing, waving a streamer or her small blanket above her head, running circles around the living room. I’m rinsing down the sink, taking a soap sponge over the stainless steel. But I want to bottle this moment up and wear it around my neck so I can unscrew the top and inhale its scent whenever needed. I want to pin it down, like butterfly wings behind glass, like laundry on a line. All I know is this is how it should be.

And Three More

1. One Book I’m Reading

   Every day before dinner, my daughter video calls my mom in the States. This winter, my mom picked up the Yasmin Series by Saadia Faruqi from the library to read to her during their calls. It’s a cute transitional chapter book series about a second grade girl named Yasmin. Yasmin finds herself in different situations throughout the series (gardening, cooking, and ice skating, to name a few) where she must use her imagination and spunk to problem solve. Great for beginner readers who love the Mercy Watson series and the Owl Diaries—and great for grandmas and grandkids who live far from each other.
   
   

2. One Meal I’m Making

   I try to avoid the chaos of food blogs and stick to my printed-out recipe book for dinners, but I perused Pinterest one day looking for some new inspiration and came upon Plant Based School’s Red Pepper Pasta. Quick and easy to throw together, and if you’ve got extra time, I definitely recommend tossing in roasted eggplant at the end.

   

3. One Thing I Want You To Know

   This sermon, titled “Christ Under the Rubble” by Pastor Munther Isaac, the head of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Bethlehem. It’s worth setting aside some time to listen to the sermon in its entirety.
   “And in this Christmas season, as we search for Jesus, he is to be found not on the side of Rome, but our side of the wall. In a cave, with a simple family. Vulnerable. Barely, and miraculously surviving a massacre. Among a refugee family. This is where Jesus is found.” Lord Emmanuel—God with us—bring your peace to the hurting parts of our world.

Hi, friend. Thanks so much for stopping by. Here, I write about finding the little bits hope and joy tucked away in the long journey of waiting for circumstances to change. If you like what you read, please consider subscribing.

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I lift the flaps of an old cardboard box. It’s housed our Christmas decorations for the last several years, but “KITCHEN FRAGILE” is still printed in black sharpie across the top from when we moved out of our first apartment together six years ago.

From it, I pull out a smaller, repurposed Minnetonka Moccasin shoebox and set it on the carpet next to me. My daughter, wearing a crumpled reindeer headband on her head, comes over to inspect the box's contents. She takes over, pulling the top off and taking out the ornaments one by one. She brushes off the old newspaper and arranges them in a large arc on the carpet in front of us.

Each ornament fished from the dredges of the box tells a story about our life over the last six years:

An infant handprint
A miniature ceramic pitcher
A wooden stirring spoon
A dove shaped from olive wood
A cheesy Santa holding a sign that says Merry Christmass (extra ‘s’ included)

While my daughter focuses on the ornaments, I reach for a long, narrow cardboard box. Here it is, I announce. I slide out the collapsed Christmas tree, and an uneasy sadness spreads over me. 

It’s a wimpy little thing we got on a whim during our first Christmas as a married couple. We found the Christmas tree cheap in a local market here. A treasure, really. The week before Christmas, the store had set out the most dismal holiday display with dusty boxes of these tabletop artificial trees, kitschy ornaments, and a Santa hat. Surprised to find Christmas decorations in a country that didn’t formally recognize the holiday, we bought the whole display.

I weave colored lights over and under each spindly plastic branch. I kind of hate this tree, to be honest. Now, seven years later, this region of the world has caught on to selling all the trappings of the holiday season, and it’s not uncommon to find elaborate displays in grocery stores, including trees in every shape and size. But something stops me every year from looking for a newer, bigger one.

We keep saying next year. 
Next year, when we are out of here.
Next year, everything will be ok.
Next year, all the pieces will be put back together, and the holidays will be what we’ve always dreamed they would be.
Next year, we’ll get a bigger tree.

This little tree, with its storied ornament counterparts, has become an annual reminder of our wish to be anywhere but here, tangled with the reality that we are still here.

My daughter laughs and lays her hand over her six-month-old handprint immortalized in salt dough. The ornament nearly disappears under her larger three-year-old hand. 

She rises from her spot on the floor and hangs the handprint on the tree, lower branch, front and center. She hangs the rest of the ornaments in that exact spot, causing the branch to droop. When we’re finished, I plug in the garish multicolored lights that blink and fade, casting pinpricks of blues, reds, and greens into the darkening room. 

This tree is a little disappointing in its stature and shape. It isn’t Instagram-worthy. In a way, it’s become like that one odd family member to me. It embarrasses me each year, but to outsiders, I feel the need to defend it.  

This tree, in all its cheesiness, is symbolic of a messy story, one cobbled together with scruffy prayers and late-night laments. It stands as a story laced with God’s faithfulness and gracious love.

My daughter lets out an exhaled wow, now that the tree is fully decorated, and I can’t help but laugh, squinting hard to try to see what she sees. Criss-cross on the floor in front of the tree, I pull her onto my lap and rest my chin on her shoulder. 

I wish we had been given a tidier story, one including a towering tree adorned with classy white lights, a roaring hearth, and a mantle hung with heirloom stockings. A story with family close by and all the broken pieces glued back together. A story of wholeness, of full-circle moments, of answered prayers and mourning turned to dancing. 

But this tree represents something more than just the snarled mess of a dream not yet come true. This little plastic tree, surviving year after year, stands as a symbol of hope for a future beyond our current circumstances, strength to endure the unknown, and peace while we wait for the light to come.

And if I try to see with the eyes of a three-year-old, well then, I think there’s some magic here, too.

Here are some Christmas traditions, new and old, in our family:

Advent Candle Readings
Each Sunday, we cook a big fish dinner (for no deeper reason other than the fish market brings in their freshest fish over the weekend). We sit at the dining room table instead of our normal spots in the kitchen, bring out the nicer tableware, and light a new candle each week. This year is the first year my daughter is beginning to understand the Christmas story, so I found some free, kid-friendly Advent readings we’ve been enjoying from Muscadine Press.

Christmas Book Countdown
Over the last few years, I’ve collected winter and Christmas-themed books when I’m stateside. This year, I kept them tucked away until right before December when I pulled them out and individually wrapped each one. Each evening after dinner, my daughter chooses a book to open, and we read it together as a family.

Some of our favorite titles this year are Over and Under the Snow by Kate Messner, Home for Christmas by Jan Brett, and A Very Noisy Christmas by Tim Thornborough.

Yalda Night
On December 21st, we celebrate the Winter Solstice. In Persian culture, this is called Yalda Night. We light all the candles, eat a special dinner, and play music. It’s one of my favorite times of the winter season. We get to rejoice that, while it is the longest night of the year, starting the next morning, more and more light will come. Light always wins over darkness.

The 3 PM Pause
After coming across ’s piece: Every Day at 3 PM?, I’ve started pausing at the same time each day where I just take a moment to look around, to notice, and to appreciate whatever is happening at that time. I chose 3 PM, too, because, at our house, it is such a liminal space. 3 PM is a post-nap, not quite dinner, purgatory time of day. Always a little different and completely ordinary.

But in the middle of all the swirling busyness of the holidays and just life in general, pausing at the same time each day is such a simple practice that urges me to notice, rest, and reflect before it quickly passes by.

Some other things we do…
We eat cinnamon rolls on Christmas morning. I put them together the night before and pop ‘em in the oven while we open stockings. // Sometime in December, I bake Norwegian almond cake as a delicious nod to my side of the family. // Aside from stockings, we don’t really exchange gifts (my daughter opens one or two big ticket items on Christmas Day, but that’s really it from us). Instead, for the past couple of years, we’ve planned a staycation for one night at a little-fancier-than-we-normally-stay-at hotel a few days after Christmas. // And we squeeze in time for our annual re-watches of It’s a Wonderful Life, A Christmas Story, and Home Alone 2 (the best in the franchise, IMO).

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The weather matched the concrete neighborhood around us. Dark clouds loomed overhead. There was a definite chill in the air that wasn’t there last week. The gloomy day made everything look particularly dull and dirty.

It was cold, temperatures hanging not too far above freezing, but I forced us both outside anyway. My daughter and I played half-heartedly at the playground, the wind whipping hard between the highrises. We shoved our hands in our coat pockets, our shoulders scrunched up to our ears while we trudged through the sand.

When I finally conceded to her protests to go inside, I made us take the long way around. Because it’s good to get outside and get some fresh air! I hurrahed, trying to convince myself too.

To distract ourselves, we played Color Walk, something we’ve done in the past to shake up our outside time. The rules are simple: Pick a color and try to spot it as many times as we can on our walk. Take photos, too.

To counter the dull dreariness around us, we chose yellow.

For a while, it was mostly all various shades of gray: gray buildings, gray parking garages, gray retaining walls, and gray skies. But then my daughter looked a few steps ahead of her and shouted, “Yellow trash!” and held up a crumpled yellow juice box.

I matched her enthusiasm when I spotted a yellow taxi turning the corner, its tires crossing over yellow lines in the parking lot. A woman walked past us with her two terriers named Harry and Chocolate (we asked), in their bright yellow harnesses. We passed a lilac bush. All its leaves had turned a papery yellow. My daughter picked up one of its lost leaves skittering on the ground and waved it high above her head. It fluttered in her hand like a tiny flag.

There was a yellow plastic bag blown up against a bare-branched bush, yellow graffiti spray painted along the ground, the cracked yellow plastic seats of the teeter-totter, and a yellow shovel left behind in the sand.

Then we turned a corner and found a rosebush still blooming in November. What a sight. Five, six, seven pastel yellow heads sat comfortably deep in the green leaves.

Around this time of year, clouds usually start their descent around me, hanging heavy on my shoulders and fogging my vision. Nine years and it doesn’t get any easier living half a world away from home and family during the holidays.

Braided with homesickness and all the memories I’ve missed out on are the question marks that suspend in front of me and the uncertainty lurking in the back of my mind. There’s this longing for a life beyond here floating just out of reach, like dust motes in the weak light. I’m also carrying the broken pieces of loved ones close to me right now. Prayers for hope, healing, and things to be made right wake me in the small hours of the dark.

And there is so much darkness, isn’t there?

The thing about playing Color Walk with a three-year-old is that the rules get a little fluid. When we saw the yellow roses and clipped off a blossom to bring back inside, my daughter spotted more flowers growing near them: purple-blue stems of a lavender bush and crimson red winterberries.

And then we saw the heads of dandelions smattered along the concrete curb and a lethargic bee, still above ground.

A man with a bright red scarf wrapped around his neck stepped out of a parked car. Grade school boys wearing Chicago Bulls t-shirts and Messi jerseys kicked around a blue soccer ball on the basketball court. A discarded cigarette lay at my feet, the smudge of coral lipstick left behind on it. The setting sun broke through the gray, causing the clouds to turn pink as they passed behind the highrises and cranes.

The gray of the world began to melt away.

When my daughter was a baby, we’d stare at her for hours, trying to memorize every fold of her skin, every dimple, every roll—all the lines and dots and marks that made up this swaddled chubby life asleep in our arms. We knew even then that babies don’t keep.

So I did the same that day. I tried to memorize her skipping next to me, singing This Little Light of Mine as we searched for yellow. I felt the soft curl of the rose petals in my hands and took in the bee, the taxi, the lipstick, the clouds—because I knew this season wouldn’t keep.

Running ahead, my daughter spotted something in the dying grass and called me over to get a closer look. A butterfly rested motionless on a blade of grass. When we moved closer, it snapped open its wings, revealing iridescent cobalt blue and russet brown spots.

Despite its name, the common blue butterfly is not so common, especially this time of year and especially in a place like this, far from meadows and gardens where these species typically thrive.

We watched the butterfly slowly open and close its wings, like a fan on a languorously hot day. The staccato knocking of a drill, exhaust fumes, and the clatter of traffic filled the air. We were a long way from grassy meadows and sunny, lush gardens. This creature was in a habitat not made for them, but it seemed unperturbed by this fact.

It moved suddenly like it had just remembered something on its to-do list, startling us both. We hauled ourselves up from the cold grass and watched the butterfly skitter and coast out of sight.

The very next morning it snowed. It was the earliest I’ve ever seen it snow since living here. The wind blew against the window pane in the kitchen, and I peeked behind the curtain to see what was happening outside.

It was still dark. No other apartment lights were on quite yet, although I like to think there could have been more like me watching out of darkened windows, taking in the magic of the early snow. In the pool of the yellow streetlights, thousands of tiny snowflakes swirled and spun, looking like pinpricks of light in the thick darkness.

Three Things and Three More is an every-other-month(ish) newsletter with three bitesized (probably unrelated) essays and three quick (also probably unrelated) things I want to share with you.

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Three Things

1.  Over and Over and Over Again
   
   We fill water bottles and buy go-gurts and cheese sticks while thinking about what it might be like to raise a child in another part of the world. And we say things like You should have seen her eating her rice last night! and a minute later Did you hear the hospital was bombed? The bakery? We wipe tears and bottoms and countertops. We scroll and swipe and pray. We share videos of her singing I’m a Little Teapot and then footage of a wide-eyed child shellshocked and shaking. Pictures of a Starbucks cup, freshly painted nails, cities under siege, fleeing on foot. Giggles and horror. The everyday and the unbelievable. It’s a pendulum constantly swinging. A messy swirl of everything, too complicated to pick apart. And we remind ourselves how fragile it all is. The miracle of just being alive. How lucky we are. To wake up and see the sunrise. To be free. Safe. Unafraid. Over and over and over again.
   

2. Why I Plant Flowers in the Fall
   
   Because they’re beautiful. Because my toddler saw the pots at the grocery store and whispered, “Amazing.” Because she chose the pink blooms and I chose the orange. Because I didn’t even know mums came in pink. Because when my husband went to the nursery earlier, the old man patted him on the back and said, “My son, you missed the season. Flowers are for the spring and summer.” Because they contrast the crunchy leaves, the bare branches, and the dry grass. Because it’s life when everything else is dying. Because I have the perfect spot for them on my balcony. Because they remind me of my favorite book as a child. Because Chrysanthemum, Chrysanthemum, Chrysanthemum. Because I need to feel the dirt under my fingernails. Because I need something to tend to. Because I need something that puts down roots. Because they are superfluous, nonessentials. Because they are flushes of hope. Because they flourish even when the ground threatens to freeze. Because these are the good old days. Because real life is right here at our fingertips. Because the season for flowers has not passed. Because fall is for blooming, too.
   

3. Things I Don’t Want to Forget
   

   How she thinks every black cat in town is named “Midnight”

   How I catch him looking at her with such intensity, wonder, fierce protectiveness, and love, and, how in that small moment, all the heavy burdens seem to slide right off of him

   How the eastern light forms a rainbow at the same time every morning, bouncing off the mirror and onto the bed

   How the western light, warm and easy, dapples across the kitchen cabinets and casts leafy shadows on the refrigerator

   The end-of-season tomatoes, fat, juicy, red and green, and gorgeous

   Our walks to the corner grocery store. Should we go the short-cut way or the long way? (Always the long way)

   How overjoyed she gets over a snail shell, a cat leaping over the weeds, a lone cloud in the sky, the moon

And Three More

1. One book I’m reading

   

   I was coincidentally in the middle of Salt Houses by Hala Alyan when the war erupted in early October. Salt Houses is a heartbreaking story of a Palestinian family displaced by the Seven Day War in 1967. It is told through multiple perspectives, spanning multiple decades as they endure war, loss, and displacement.

   
   “What is a life? A series of yeses and noes, photographs you shove in a drawer somewhere, loves you think will save you but that cannot. Continuing to move, enduring, not stopping even when there is pain. That's all life is, he wants to tell her. It's continuing.” - Salt Houses

2. One meal I’m cooking
   
   Fall baking is in full swing in our kitchen. We’ve recently moved cities, and baking has been a calming rhythm I’ve carried over to our new apartment. This apple scone recipe is perfect (and doesn’t call for applesauce–something not available here!). Just add salt and up the spices.

   

3. One thing I want you to know
   
   I write a lot about “joy crumbs” and finding little glimmers of goodness in everyday life. But a question that sometimes gnaws at the back of my mind is Is it a privilege to be able to look for joy? Being married to someone who has been displaced as a refugee for the last decade, I often struggle to reconcile looking for the joy crumbs with the unspeakable horrors happening in the world.
   
   I really appreciated this exchange between and about hoarding bits of magic even in the most terrible of circumstances. Maia’s words about her sister in Israel were heartbreaking and hopeful all at once.

   {un‧kempt} with Maia Toll

   What is Magic?

   I suspect we all have a life quest, or maybe I should say a life question. This question is the foundation toward which our roots are always seeking. Some of us are exploring acceptance, others personal power, still others, the intricacies of family. There are countless questions at the core of our humanity…

   Read more

   3 years ago · 39 likes · 14 comments · Maia Toll and Laura Pashby

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A rainstorm had rolled through earlier, leaving behind giant mud puddles pooling in the dusty edges of the unpaved streets and the dips of grass patches in our neighborhood.

One giant puddle at the playground, made worse by a sprinkler still dripping water, pulls my daughter toward it like a magnet. The squelch of sludge under her shoes, she quickly realizes, is so much more fun than the swings and slides. She lifts one foot and then the other and begins a slow march in the middle of the puddle. Soon, she crouches down, digging her fingers into the muck, delighting at the surprise coolness of the mud over her hands and up her arms. 

The rainstorm has caused earthworms to rise from the ground, squirming in the puddle. My daughter carefully pulls them out one by one and places them in her palm. She immediately assigns them names: Peanut Butter, Jelly, and Cracker.

I look on amused and horrified, unsure if I should stop her or let her have her fun. No one is at the playground, but I wonder what the neighborhood aunties would think, quick to give their opinion and tut-tut at the dirty child. Everything around us is brown and wet. The clouds hang overhead, not quite dissipating, still full of rain.

The other week, we drove up to the top of the ridges that enclose the city. We parked the car by the gate—a pitiful attempt at stopping people from going here. We got out and shimmied around the the gate, holding hands as we went, toddler on a hip, unsure step after unsure step.

Orange corrugated roofs stretched for miles, and the tendrils of smoke from a dozen chimneys meandered like ghosts above the city. The concrete buildings here are constructed haphazardly. Each one is shoved up next to another, whole floors slapped on top of first levels, making the city seem off-kilter like something isn’t quite right. The trees push out of the ground at odd angles like they haven’t properly taken root.

This city hosts thousands of displaced people who have fled the scourge of wars and persecution. A palpable heaviness always hangs over the streets, as if the sorrow experienced by its unwelcomed inhabitants for the last decade still clings to the buildings and sidewalks.

It threatens to cling to us too.

Here is not where we want to call home, yet, here is where we’ve been for the past nine years.

Moving on from the mud puddle, my daughter caked in dirt up to her elbows, we meander back to our house. We always go the same route when leaving this playground: past the yard with the chickens, turn left and run down the wide, flat gravel road, and say hello to the big sleepy dog, who lies in the middle of the street.

We walk by one house in particular, where an older woman is frequently in her yard, hanging laundry, cutting branches, or sweeping her steps. Because we always walk the same way back home, she has seen us multiple times and bustles out of her yard to tell us hello each time.

She emerges from her garden, the end of her apron folded to her chest. Please, please, take these peppers, she urges us, pinching my daughter’s cheek with her free hand. She unfolds her apron, revealing piles of green peppers, and begins tossing them into the back compartment of the stroller before I can object.

At bedtime, we pull out The Last Stop on Market Street, a children’s book in regular rotation at our house. It’s about a boy, CJ, and his nana who take the bus after church to a soup kitchen. CJ spends most of the book complaining, while his nana offers a different perspective on the things irritating him.

We don’t have easy access to English books here, so the titles we do have are well-loved and well-worn. Having read “Last Stop on Market Street” countless times, my daughter easily recites the lines and finishes the rhymes.

I tuck her in, and the rain outside starts again, pattering against the bedroom window. 

Every Friday on my Instagram, I share a series of photos titled “#joycrumbs," a riff on Mary Oliver's poem “Don’t Hesitate.”

A couple of years ago, I found inspiration in the poem's last line: Joy is not made to be a crumb. So at the start of the weekend, I post pictures I’ve taken throughout the week, little things that have caught my attention: the extra-bright moon, a close-up shot of two coffee mugs, a beetle on a leaf, a wildflower growing through a crack—little crumbs of joy tucked into the ordinary. 

Taking notice of these pieces of joy has been my life jacket during a long and hard season. It’s a way to keep my head buoyed above the waves.

Make no mistake, though. My life is not all lovely things. Not even close. I have to dig and dig to find them. 

Towards the end of Last Stop on Market Street, after many gripes about the rain and not having their own car, CJ and his nana step off the bus. As they walk through the streets, CJ sees the graffiti and dilapidated buildings and asks why the neighborhood is always so dirty. His grandma points to a rainbow arching over the soup kitchen and says, “Sometimes when you’re surrounded by dirt, CJ, you’re a better witness for what’s beautiful.”

The ordinary comfort of chatting back and forth, of a neighbor who knows us and waits for us, and these small stories that make up the fabric of our lives— they’re all a warmth offered to a homesick heart that longs to be anywhere but here.

And, in all the muck and mud, these bits of beauty shine a little brighter.

Related:
- I love popping into ’s weekly Everyday Magic on Notes. Each Saturday, her community of readers share little moments from the week that made them smile. It’s such a lovely thread to peruse, taking in photos of pets and flowers and sunsets from around the world.
- shares similarly in her newsletter, listing the simple things in her everyday life, or as she says, “finding the magic in the mundane and making a beautiful life out of it.”
- Coincidentally, I was in the middle of drafting this essay, when I came across , who wrote a beautiful piece based on Last Stop on Market Street and seeing the beauty in the neighborhood she and her family live in.

So tell me, what are some joy crumbs from your week? What is a little spark of goodness that has caught your eye?

Morning coffee with a loved one, a conversation with a neighbor, a good book, a new recipe? Big or small, let’s wipe off the dirt and be better witnesses to what’s beautiful.

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The moon is full. She asks, but I don’t really know why we can sometimes see the moon during the day. Something about the sun’s light, I assume. And the swallows! They fly past us, exhilaratingly close, screeching together in small groups, looking for a place to land.

She tells a story of a butterfly that flew so high it caught the moon. She pretends to lasso it with her jean jacket, George Bailey style. I imagine the butterfly, who was supposed to stay among the blades of grass, flying higher and higher in the sky, going where it wanted to, on an adventure to catch the moon. She says maybe the butterfly can bring the moon back down to earth. I tell her I think that’s a good thought. Maybe it can.

We spot an airplane cutting a line across the golden moon. The sun reflects off the aircraft making it glow red. Maybe the airplane can grab the moon, she says. Maybe it can, I say. And then we can get on, too, and fly and fly and fly.

This post is part of a blog hop with Exhale—an online community of women pursuing creativity alongside motherhood, led by the writing team behind Coffee + Crumbs. Click here to view the next post in the series "Moment in Time".