Spring Fever

The weather. Always a hot topic at home in Nebraska (since it directly effects my dad’s work) or in Nashville when there’s even the possibility of a snowflake or the thermometer going below 35. It’s also a constant fallback in small talk conversation, one I’ve found it particularly useful when awkwardly stuck in the elevator with someone at work.



I’ve realized how often my mood is also affected by the weather. Last weekend it was COLD and snowy, and I was grumpy. (Once the Christmas season is over, I’m so done with the cold “perks” like warm beverages and sweaters and just ready for spring.) The past few days it’s been much warmer out, hinting that spring is just around the corner, and I’ve been frolicking all over Franklin and Nashville with a smile on my face and my sunroof open. As I went for a walk today, I started thinking about all the little things about summer/spring that make me happy and I’m looking forward to experiencing again.

I thought I’d list some of them here (in no particular order) with “Christmas-like” anticipation of the upcoming seasons…

• smelling the Magnolias and honeysuckle
• wearing flip flops and cute sandals (goodbye socks, hello pedicures)
• daylight lasting longer than 10 minutes after I leave work
• reading a book by our pool
• diving into the swimming pool –nothing beats that rush of your first dive of the summer
• hosting pool parties for my friends, my church small group, and Hadley and Callie
• going to visit Farrah and maybe even catch a Red Sox game
• wearing skirts and fun dresses to work and church instead of jeans all the time
• having a tan (goodbye winter white, I won’t miss you.)
• that feeling of being drenched with sweat after a run because of the heat (yes, I’m weird)
• playing catch and volleyball at the park
• eating outside at Jackson’s and PM under white twinkle lights
• cookouts at Christina’s house
• riding the bike I’m planning to buy
• freshly cut grass
• GOING TO THE BEACH

“In the midst of winter I finally realized there was within me an invincible summer.”
~ Albert Camus

Tell Me A Story.

“Tell me that story again, the one that has no ending,
and that will be the story of you and me…”

I’ve had this line from a Fleming & John song in my head almost all weekend. This weekend as I traveled to fabulous Las Vegas, I was not only reminded how much I love my family, but also how much I love stories.



Stories are something I cherish; the name of this blog was no accident. In some ways, I think stories, whether fact or fiction, are the only way the world makes sense to me. They are constantly running through my mind, keeping me entertained and hopeful… something that just happened, something I hope will happen, a memory from long ago, something that happened to someone I’ve never met…for better or worse, there is always some story going through this head of mine.

This weekend while traveling I had a chance to read two books that I want to publicly recommend reading (as any believer in word-of-mouth marketer would). Both happen to be stories of real people.

Unlikely Angel: The Untold Story of the Atlanta Hostage Hero
by Ashley Smith

This story has fascinated me since the day I saw Ashley on the news immediately following her ordeal. I literally had to re-do my make-up that morning because I was so moved by what she wanted Brian Nichols to know in prison. Reading more of her story taught me so much about myself and how I view others…

-and-

Telling Secrets by Frederick Buechner

Buechner shares my passion for stories, and he put into words some reasons why they are important to him...in a much more eloquent way than I have been able to. So with that said, I end this entry with three of my favorite paragraphs from the beginning of his book, Telling Secrets…

“This is all part of the story about what it has been like for the last ten years or so to be me, and before anybody else has the chance to ask it, I will ask it myself: Who cares?…But I talk about my life anyway because if, on the one hand, hardly anything could be less important, on the other hand, hardly anything could be more important. My story is important not because its mine, God knows, but because if I tell it anything like right, it is also yours. Maybe nothing is more important than that we keep track, you and I, of these stories of who we are and where we have come from and the people we have met along the way because it is precisely through these stories in all their particularity, as I have long believed and often said, that God makes himself known to each of us most powerfully and personally. If this is true, it means that to lose track of our stories is to be profoundly impoverished not only humanly but also spiritually.”


“We believe in God – such as it is, we have faith – because certain things happened to us once and go on happening. We work and goof off, we love and dream, we have wonderful times and awful times, are cruelly hurt and hurt others cruelly, get mad and bored and scared stiff and ache with desire, do all such human things as these, and if our faith is not mainly just window dressing or a rabbit’s foot or fire insurance, it is because it grows out of precisely this kind of rich human compost. The God of Biblical faith is the God who meets us at these moments in which for better or worse we are being most human, most ourselves, and if we lose touch with those moments, if we don’t stop from time to time to notice what is happening to us and around us and inside us, we run the tragic risk of losing touch with God too.”

“I believe that we are called to see that the day-by-day lives of all of us – the things that happened long ago, the things that happened only this morning, are also hallowed and crucial and part of a great drama in which souls are lost and souls are saved including our own…I not only have secrets, I am my secrets. And you are your secrets. Our secrets are human secrets, and our trusting each other enough to share them with each other has much to do with the secret of what it is to be human.”