My friend Amy Yoder McGloughlin is a Conference Minister in Pennsylvania for Mennonite Church USA, and was in Jackson this weekend for some denominational meetings Saturday. Then she preached this morning at Jubilee Mennonite Church in Meridian.
Amy is one of my favorite people – we’ve been friends more than a decade. She used to be pastor of Germantown Mennonite Church – the oldest Mennonite church in the US, and because of her, I preached there back in 2014 or so.
We have 4 permanent cats in out house, and at any given time, between 2-6 kittens. Of all the cats, Puss is our oldest.
She’s 11 years old, and we rescued her when she was still nursing. She’s always got a look of anxiety on her face, but she’s very affectionate (as long as it’s on her terms). When it thunders outside, she opens a kitchen cabinet and hides inside.
There is a surprising number of Chinese people who live in Mississippi, most descended from people who came here as laborers in the “after slavery” years.
Mr. Chen’s is a Chinese restaurant/ Chinese food market/ Chinese restaurant supply store here in Jackson. It gives off street bazaar vibes (that is a good thing) and the food is excellent. It manages a good blend of authenticity but also throws enough American Chinese Food fan service into the mix that your Aunt Edna who loves General Tso’s Chicken can order off the menu.
I was in a bit of a funk, so I made chili dogs for supper.
Pro-tip: If you only need a little shredded cheese and don’t want to dirty up the knuckle buster grater, use a vegetable peeler and slice off thin slices of cheese instead
Also, if you are a Costco member, their Kirkland hot dogs are amazing. And don’t sleep on the Cabot Creamery 3 year cheddar.
This post is not sponsored by Costco, but if they want to talk, I’m open.
These are pitcher plants – they’re carnivorous, like Venus Flytraps are, and they’re native to the southeast. I have a container of them growing on our back deck
When I get my ducks in a row, I want to build a carnivorous garden bed in the backyard. I love them.
Like most horrible things, they’re beautiful. I see the flies hovering around them and wish I could warn the flies away, but instead I sit and watch them fly into the trap, doomed.
I am 100% convinced that sandwiches taste better when sliced corner to corner.
I will not be taking advice to the contrary at this time.
It’s 8PM and 62 degrees in late October, and I’m in my front yard, because I forgot to bring the trash cans up after trash pickup today.
My neighborhood is 3/4 of a century old, and the tall pines and live oaks and southern magnolias that fill our neighborhood mean that it’s mostly green year round. They reach for the sky, these trees do, and hold you, letting you know that you are protected, safe, loved.
I understand that there are people who live where there are not trees. It’s important to learn early in life that not everyone has the advantages you do.
As I was standing on the edge of the road in my quiet, verdant street, I looked up toward the sky and just felt gratitude. I love it here, and wouldn’t care to live anywhere else.
Sixteen years ago today, we got married.
On that morning, I had less than $30 in my checking account, having spent the massive sum of $80 the night before on pizza and two liter softdrinks for our rehearsal dinner.
My car was a small Kia with a leaky radiator someone had given me, because I couldn’t afford a car. My bride was in the early stages of the heart failure that had killed her mother, grandmother, and cousin.
A friend had lent us his condo at the beach for a week, so we could have a proper honeymoon. Another friend catered the reception, and told us we could have a month to pay for the food costs. Mom and Dad paid for the cake – it came from the grocery store down the street.
And virtually every person at the wedding handed us some cash, so we could have a lovely week at the beach – else we could not have afforded the trip.
As I said, the car had a leaky radiator, so I had a trunk full of jugs of water, and every so often I would pull over on the shoulder of the road and top it off. While at the beach, the car had an electrical problem, and I worked on it late into the night in the parking lot of the nice restaurant where we are supper.
Sixteen years later, literally nothing is the same. A different state, a different city. My wife has a new heart. We live in a house we love, in a neighborhood we love, and we can afford to get to a different beach 4 or 5 times most years. Renee does kitten rescue and I write things that matter to some folks, and for 16 years we have made it work, mostly because we have decided it will.
Sixteen years. 30 percent of my life. 6,540-ish days, more good than bad.
I’m glad she said yes.
The little door to enter the crawlspace under our house is tiny – perhaps 18 inches square. Every time I have to go under our house, I swear I never want to do this again.
The plastic that has been laid in the crawlspace to keep the humidity down rustles as I crawl on my hands and knees over it. It’s dirty and opaque, and in the worst parts of my brain I imagine snakes slithering under it, keeping warm as the temperature drops outside.
I have never seen a snake under this house, but my brain knows they are there.
It’s seven thirty in the morning, and it’s 46 degrees outside, and I am crawling under my house with a flashlight in my mouth trying really hard to not think about snakes because both of the toilets in our house backed up yesterday evening and I’m afraid I shall have to replace a section of drainage pipe. I cannot remember what size drainage pipe we have from the last time I had to replace a section.
Most houses have 4-inch drainage pipe – and as it turns out, we do as well. But our house is seventy-five years old, and was built at a time when all the standards were not yet written in stone. You cannot take such things for granted with such a house as this one. Like the Holy Spirit, it goes where it chooses.
At some point in the sordid history of this house, a jack legged renovation in the en-suite bath led to chunks of mortar and concrete ending up in the drain pipes, and shortly after we bought the house, I had to crawl under the house and cut out a huge section of the 4 inch cast iron pipe and replace it with PVC because the chunks of concrete had wedged themselves in there.
I assumed instantly that since they were both clogged, this must be a piece of the concrete we had missed, come back to haunt us.
The last time this happened, I tried plunging it, and tried pouring Drano down the tub drain, and I even took the toilet out and tried running a plumbing snake down the drainage pipe. That last adventure is how I discovered the chunks of concrete. It was then that I surrendered and called Dad.
My father was one of those men who could solve any problem. He could fix your air conditioner, rebuild your engine, or rewire your breaker panel. And for 48 years of my life, whenever I had a problem I could not solve, I called him for help.
I explained the situation to him, and said I didn’t know what to do.
He asked two questions. “Does the other toilet work?”
I said that it did.
“The one that is clogged – is it closer to the road or further from the road than the one that works?” was the second question.
“The clogged one is furthest away from the road”, I told him.
“Then it’s simple”, he said. “You have a blockage – probably some chunks of that concrete – between the clogged toilet and the wye where the other toilet joins the drainage pipe. You need to go under the house and cut out the clogged pipe and replace it.”
Oh. That’s all.
He heard the uncertainty in my voice, and walked me through what I needed to buy, the procedures of how to do it, and all of that. And that afternoon, I did it, saving myself probably $800 in the process.
But it had been five years since my Dad died, quickly and unexpectedly, one of the more than 15,000 Mississippians who died of COVID during the pandemic. In fact, it had been five years ago yesterday.
Five years since I could ask him for help. Five years since I had a backup plan. Five years since I could hear him on the other end of the phone and know that my worries were over.
For the last five years, I’ve just been on my own.
It turns out that I didn’t have to replace any pipe this time. It wasn’t a piece of concrete, just a pernicious clog. In an attempt to avoid crawling under the house again, I decided to try snaking it from the cleanout in the front yard. This approach had hit me at 3 in the morning, when I remembered Dad’s two questions, and realized that if both toilets were clogged, the clog must be after the wye where the two branches join, and thus really close to the cleanout at the front of the house.
Twenty minutes later all the pipes were running freely, and the disaster was averted and I had spent no money at all. And literally my first thought when I saw the toilets flush successfully was that I wish Dad could know about this. That he could know I figured it out. That he knew I was OK. That I didn’t need a backup plan.
I wish he knew I could make it on my own.
Kathy Escobar and Phyllis Mathis interviewed me on their podcast Soul + Practice: Raw Conversations, Real Practices, and it went live yesterday.
Kathy was an early role model as I carved out this weird life I have now – she is one of perhaps 5 folks whose work changed my life. I think I’ve known her for 19 years now.
If you are new here (or not), there is a lot that might interest you on here: My “origin” story, beauty as an antidote to despair, practices that can sustain you over time, and making room in the midst of it all for joy to happen.
I also talk a bit about what it means to live in the deep south when the country is on fire, and it’s probably not what you might think.
It was a lot of fun, and Kathy and I are currently trying to figure out more ways to work together. I know I’m really looking forward to that.
Hopeful in spite of the facts
