From an Unbaptized Girl

I sit in heavy air tonight. It hangs thick around my ears and in my hair and out the screen door where the lightning bugs are beginning to flicker for one more dance in the dark. The fan is doing its darndest to be an air conditioner, but it can't change its nature. It can only swirl the hot air around languidly from one room to the next before it makes its way back again to the kitchen table where I sit clacking keys.

I've been thinking an awful lot lately--about living alone, about the feeling of having finished my first year of teaching, about church. About writing another blog post after what feels like months of finishing one thing only to be caught up in the next. About what it takes to slow down and breathe in the middle of day-to-day craziness...slowing down to notice the smell of watermelon in the park or to pick up a bluejay feather, slowing down to give thanks. About what it means to be baptized after years of thinking and doubting and wondering and being won.

Thinking, too, about what it means to feel a peace that hangs as thick and heavy as the air around me. I don't always feel it, but only having felt it once one learns to know the taste. Even when faced with failure, with one's own state of brokenness, the memory of this peace sticks in the soul like honey and slowly fills up the cracks and sweetens shame with grace.

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I don't have a whole lot of space in my apartment, but I've tried to fill it with things that matter. Some of my dearest possessions (and I kid not...) have been my plants. When I first moved here last August, my best friend from high school and her other-best-friend-boyfriend-nice-boy-Kevin came to visit. We went to a plant and produce stand called Frog Pond (which I was disappointed to learn had neither frogs nor a pond) where we wandered the greenhouses admiring plants. Kevin, who is altogether too generous for his own good, slyly bought me pretty much all of the plants I took a liking to as a housewarming gift. They started out this fall small and spindly. They brought life to the apartment, though, and gave me something to take care of. I felt a kinship with them as they put roots down and grew accustomed to being somewhere outside the greenhouse. I walked into my apartment after school every afternoon to plants that were growing greener and friendlier and bigger by the day. When my African violet burst into bloom, I felt like a proud mother crooning over her first child.

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I don't know what I'm going to say when I'm baptized this Sunday. Baptism is public, and it feels like I'll be dragging some of the deepest parts of myself out into full view for others to look at. What does one say at such a time? I'm not sure yet. What I am sure of, though, is that this is something I want despite the discomfort of public proclamation.

And oddly enough?

 I think it has something to do with the African violet sitting by my window.