October's Alarm

October. What’s so good about it? For me, it’s a love-hate relationship. Living in the high desert, October holds no promise of autumn, but it does offer the promise of ending Daylight Savings Time.

If anyone is keeping tally of my random pet peeves, feel free to add Daylight Savings to the list. In my way of thinking, it makes no sense to enforce a time change in a region so close to the equator. The days and nights are already fairly equally distributed year-round.

As it stands, many indigenous people boycott the time change, if they even know it exists. This causes all sorts of misunderstandings, like we don’t have enough confusion as it is. We plan an event or a meeting with people, never entirely sure what time they will show up. Does anybody really know what time it is? Does anybody really care? (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.)

These early days of October, the clock daily alarms me out of a deep and sometimes lovely dream. However last week I was relieved to hear that awful clanging on two consecutive mornings when the alarm delivered me from a newly recurring nightmare. Do you ever have those?

As a child, did you ever have that nightmare where you were out in public only to discover you were practically naked? My grown up, missionary version of this nightmare goes like this: Dh and I are hiking out to an Indian village, where I try to discretely photograph all the colorful and interesting people. No matter what I do, people gawk at me.

In this crazy dream that won’t end without the alarm clock, dh is happily engaged in conversation with the men of the village while I am being overtly shunned and ostracized by the women. Always I realize too late that I am wearing shorts – a huge cultural taboo, particularly among Christians. Then I try frantically to wrap a rebozo (Indian shawl) like Miss Wear-it-on-My-Sleeves, to make it look like a skirt of some sort.

Not to defy Miss What- to-Wear-Wednesdays, who recently condemned the use of the ugly but ever so practical granny gown (sigh), however, it seems coincidental that these nightmares only return on the nights when I sleep in shorty little PJ shorts, and never when I wear my ever so comfy, though undeniably homely, granny gown. Just saying….

So, back to October.

What do you love/hate about October in your corner of the world?

Seldom ambivalent about anything, as you have noticed, here is my short list:

• I love that the countryside is still green, yet it is sunny enough to dry clothes on the line
• I hate the prospect of facing another long, dry, dusty season ahead
• I love that I can soon sleep that extra hour every morning
• I hate Mexico’s fascination with Day of the Dead
• I love that Halloween brings neighbors right to my doorstep
• I hate that they are all masked and I have no idea who they are

Your turn. Do tell.

IRL* Again my past posts are coming back to haunt me – even in my sleep!

Of Leaves and Leaving

Autumn is in the air. Or is it? For many of us, autumn is just a tricky spelling word we must teach our children, totally apart from any physical colors, sounds, or smells from our own childhoods.

Personally I miss that feeling of crunching through the leaves and the cooler air that smells of bonfires. Every year I reminisce, and then go back to life in perpetual springtime. We only have two seasons here: wet and dry. I love when the bougainvillea and jacaranda provide a bit of color, but it’s still not the same.

What do you do to celebrate the changing of a season that doesn’t exist? Do you drape your house with fake fall leaves like I do around Thanksgiving time? (This week for Canadians, next month for Americans) Do you put hot cider on the stove to make your house smell autumny? I would mention baking pumpkin bread, but I’ve learned that the very suggestion of canned pumpkin can make some women who can’t get it, weep.

The one thing we can do in the autumn is to look back and reminisce. I’ve spent the last week doing nothing more than to revamp my old blog full of personal stories, and to start up a new ministry blog. That has been an interesting project in itself.

Some of you may prefer to look ahead during the dreary days of fall. This brings up a question I have been mulling over for several weeks since it came up on the Sonlight international forum. My friend Kris wrote:

You know that old saying...

"Send Me, Send Me"...

we hear about it all the time, back home, everywhere.

Where's the saying "Go back, Go back"...

how come there is never any talk of that?

Is there such thing as a graceful exit strategy? Just curious.

Several readers wrote very insightful remarks, but I thought I would open it up to a wider audience. Having never done it, I’m not the one who can say. We just take it a day at a time, a year at a time, and trust God to speak clearly if He wants to redirect our steps. That sounds so overly simplistic.

I agree with one of my cyber-friends who said she wants to be as intentional about leaving as she was about going to the mission field in the first place. I don’t want to stay until one day I go berserk and miss the grandchildren (again with the imaginary grandchildren of the future), and just pack up and go home to be closer to them. Others have been forced to leave the mission field on short notice, and there was nothing graceful about their “exit” for sure.

Is there such a thing as a graceful exit strategy?

IRL* we know what clumsy looks like...how about graceful or even grace-filled?