Steps have featured prominently on my social media feeds in the last week, as back to school pictures get posted. I love the glimpse into the lives of all the kids and teens, eager and annoyed, performing and resisting the annual tradition. I love the schools and the streets, busses and front steps in the background. There are so many stories behind the photos; I can feel the courage and hope that lives under the images.

Every summer, I wait and hope for our plans to cooperate with the weather and give us a day or two on the lake with my parents’ beautiful boat. We need the sunshine to keep us warm enough and the wind to stay mild enough that we can pull the tube behind the boat. The driver and the wind work together to make waves, and the riders delight at the efforts to stay on or fall in. On these rare and perfect days, I might be the biggest kid of all.

June has been swirling its way through the world with an unbridled intensity in my world. Band concerts and ball games, kindergarten orientation and musicals, appointments that must be completed before school gives way to summer holidays. National Indigenous Peoples’ Day is offering more opportunities for building relationships, Pride flags are flying, and Juneteeth celebrates African-American emancipation from slavery.

It was quiet Saturday morning at home after several full weekends in a row. I had hoped to sleep in but the youngest was up early counting down the minutes until I got out of bed. The sun was shining in spite of a forecast for rain, and my head was an inexplicable cloud of shame. I have been practising living with joy, and so I committed to look patiently at the cloud with love.

I love the first walk out with the kids when the snow melts. Pressing on thin ice till it breaks. Wading into puddles. Dropping snow into running water to see how long it takes to break through. I love the way that spring breaks through the winter, and we feel renewed by fresh air. Mostly, I love how easy it is to taste joy on that first spring walk.

Several weeks ago, Eliot brought home a note for his school ski trip and asked if I would like to come as a chaperone. I know these requests could stop coming and I love being out on the hill, so I planned to go. I have been a snowboarder since my teens, which was surprising even two and a half decades before I could be called middle-aged. I went to be with him and his friends, and I went (without smaller children in tow) to test out if it is time for me to trade my snowboard in for skis. It is getting dangerous to risk a fall.

When I first encountered 12 step spirituality in a room of anonymous strangers, I was introduced to “the God of our own understanding.” The concept felt foreign to me, and a little bit dangerous. What would all these people do to God with their own understanding, I worried. 

There’s a strange tenderness in harsh Prairie winters. In the midst of deep fog, the temperature swings slowly, visibility declines, ice and frost coat the roads and the windows, and the hoar frost wraps the power lines and the trees. We can easily get lost in fog, and our movement through it is reduced to wandering one miniscule and tentative step at a time, our senses attuned to the tiniest and most immediate signals of our place in space and time.  

Receiving the gift is the last stage of Advent becoming Christmas. Jesus arrives and we receive the One we have awaited. The seasons and feast days of church calendars exist not only to change the colours and routines of faith life, but also change the way we live our whole lives. We learn to practice waiting — in joyful hope — for Jesus to arrive. And this practice waiting and receiving is meant to help us get better at waiting and receiving in the rest of our lives too.

The birds took their time this fall, lingering on the Prairies longer than usual. We got more sunshine and warm days than we usually do in Saskatchewan, with autumn stretching nearly two months before the blizzards knocked us squarely into winter. Most of us aren’t ready anyway (how is anyone truly ready for six or more months of winter?). The birds did their practice flights and then took off, if late.