Mary van Balen

During my second consecutive sleepless night I walked to the kitchen, toasted a slice of rye bread, and brewed a cup of herb tea, hoping comfort food would help me drift off before the alarm rang. I had a full day ahead but no energy to meet it. Exhaustion made me less stable and emotions took over. I thought about lack of employment and book manuscripts sitting somewhere on editors’ desks awaiting judgment; tears threatened.

“I just want something good to happen,” I spoke aloud to a God I hoped was listening. A job. An encouraging word from an editor. A place to make into a home. Sleep.

God wasn’t speaking. If she were, I imagined she would say that good things are happening: I have the blessing of time with my father to experience not only his aging, but also his bursts of humor and conversation. Students are excited about my class: “I can’t believe I am coming to a school where I can write papers about things that are really important to me,” one said as he left last week.

I began a mental list of “good things,” but it didn’t help. My heart was “on the ground,” and I couldn’t pick it up. As tears fell I remembered verses from Psalm 56’s lament: God takes note of my trials, my tossing and turning. God saves my tears in a bottle. Like a good mother, she knows when it was best to be still and hold her distraught daughter, letting the warmth and security of constant love give comfort words could not give.

Eventually I did fall asleep. I didn’t get enough, though, and dismissed class early the next night. I walked slowly to my car rolling behind me the small carry-on that held my computer, text books, notes and papers. At home I lugged the heavy suitcase upstairs and got ready for bed. I doubted I would need any help falling to sleep, and pulling the sheet up to my chin I smiled a sleepy smile. Someone cared enough to put my tears in a bottle. Read More 

After a night of magnificent thunderstorms, the few dark rainclouds that remained this morning moved off to the east, and breezes blew all afternoon through sunny skies.

“Unless into darkness, where shines the light…” A line from an Easter poem I wrote years ago speaks of balance and complementarity. The beauty of yesterday’s storms made today’s cool brilliance more delicious. After a morning at church and an afternoon meandering around shops and a farmers’ market, I ended up sitting on the front porch feasting on a dinner made of my purchases: soft goat cheese slathered on a slice of fresh rosemary-garlic bread and a huge, organic tomato sprinkle with salt.

Filled to the brim…I give thanks. Read More 

It’s raining. For those sitting in the stadium waiting for the big game to begin or for my daughter who rode her motorcycle over to join me for lunch, that is not such a good thing. But I don’t mind. Rain makes me want to find a good book, fix a cup of tea, and spend the day reading. My daughter called after work yesterday and said the weather on the east coast was grey and wet. “I want to go back to my apartment, put on my sweats, and just veg. Maybe read a book or watch a movie. If my friends want to get together we can sit around my place, mess and all.” In a voice that exuded relief, one friend told me that he was scrapping his outdoor “to do list” and working on quieter, more reflective tasks inside.

Rain provides permission to change plans to something we would rather be doing. I am not sure why that is true, but for me, it always has been. Waking up to the staccato sound of rain on the windows or the tin roof over my old study immediately filled my mind with alternatives to the day’s schedule: Instead of going to work, I could stay home and cook an amazing dinner or bake a batch of cookies. I could write the long overdue letter to my friend in California. I could take a walk if the rain were warm.

The older I get, the less often I follow the subversive rain whispers of abandoning “adult” responsibilities for spontaneous pursuits. But I am glad the rain hasn’t quit making the suggestions, and I am never sorry when I follow its advice. Read More 

My friend and I took a back way to Panera’s for breakfast, using a new road that zigged and zagged through an expanse of flat field before ending in a parking lot that wrapped around the strip mall from behind. Surprisingly, the sharp turns unsettled my sensitive inner ear and motion sickness set in with each bend.

“Why the turns?” I asked. No hills, rock outcroppings, streams, nothing necessitated the erratic course. The black asphalt looked as though someone had painted it with a fat brush and jerky hand across a huge, pale canvass of dying weeds. How much easier to lay two lanes straight and even.

“They’ll probably fill this field with little shops and restaurants,” my friend replied.

The shops would have to be small, I thought. On the other hand, I don’t see the big picture. The road was like life, taking turns and changing direction for no apparent reason. By this time next year, no one will remember what the field around Panera’s looked like before our consumeristic lifestyle ate up one more parcel of rich farmland. Life takes longer, but eventually, I will look back and see how its crooked lines wrote straight, forget the motion sickness and confusion, and wonder why I couldn’t trust the sense of it all along.  Read More 

Gazing out the coffee shop window, I look past a flower box full of watermelon-colored petunias to the public library across the street. I spent countless childhood hours there, curled up in a big leather chair reading Mrs. Piggle Wiggle’s Magic, books of science experiments, and biographies, especially about Abraham Lincoln.

I also ventured into gloomy stacks of the adult mystery section, tip-toeing along shelves of volumes that held horrible secrets of untimely death and clever murders. Every week I loaded my grandmother's finished books into the basket of my blue Schwin bicycle and pedaled to the library. After piling them on the “returns” counter, I slipped into the darkness and pulled new titles at random, delivering them to my grandmother who would have already read at least ten. But that left ten more to keep her going until the following week.

Today, the outside of the library looks as it always did; it is the inside that has changed. Formal carpet has replaced worn wooden floors. Computers line up on marble counters where the card catalogue once stood. Instead of a slightly dowdy grandmotherly type looking down at me as I walked around her tall desk, asking if she could help, a man wearing black suspenders, expensive gray slacks, and a starched white shirt with French cuffs held around his wrists with gold and black cufflinks sat at the information center, intent on his computer screen.

Can one be nostalgic for things one wishes had been as well as for what was?

My heart hurts with memories and unrealized expectations because I am in transition, working in a coffee shop instead of my small home office decorated like a porch on a Cape Cod beach house. Recently returned from an academic year as a resident scholar at The Collegeville Institute in Minnesota, I am staying with my elderly father while looking for a job that will allow me to rent a place I can make into home. Relationships have changed. Like the library, I am not quite the same on the inside, and I wonder when I will feel comfortable with my updated self. Read More