New life

Leftover Lace

August 16, 2022 by Margaret Philbrick 2 Comments

The Wedding is Over, Now What?

It was beautiful, but it wasn’t perfect. As I shared the post-wedding download chat over the phone with my dear friend we both concluded that life is “tainted.” Even in the moments of our greatest joy, something icky tries to steal it away.

My dad is 87 and I love him. We long ago determined that we were going to move heaven and earth to ensure that the only living grandparent made it to the wedding. This involved him doing physical therapy for months leading up to the event so that he would be strong enough to attend, buying him the Cadillac of walkers to get around (only to end up renting a wheelchair), flying he and his caregiver/escort up from Arkansas and finding them an “accessible” cabin … everything inched along on track until day 2 at our house when he started sneezing. “It’s just allergies,” he assured us. Our bride and groom cringed, we rolled the windows down in the car to air out his germs. Too late, this mother-of-the-bride caught his spewing nose inferno and I was the only blessed recipient of this gift come wedding day. Enter bottles of DayQuil, NyQuil, Airborne, Nettle drops in water, Zycam, Covid tests just to be sure (they were negative) — anything to get through the four day extravaganza of parties and people with a smile and some level of enjoyment.

It all happened. As we boarded the trolley bound for the reception I took my last large shot of DayQuil. French 75 cocktails, best-man and maid-of-honor toasts floated by in a fog. The evening I imagined dancing the night away turned into me stifling and submitting to coughing fits in the downstairs locker room, trying not to contaminate everyone else. Sadly, my repeating thought was, “Can I go home now?” Thank you to my sweet friends who took me home so I didn’t have to wait for the return trolley trip! Thank you to my beloved college roommate who grabbed me and my wheelchair bound father and helped get us on the dance floor, EARLY in the evening! Thank you to all our friends and bridal party who did have a blast and danced until they dropped!

We got him out there! photo credit: Paper Antler

Hey there tambourine man! Photo credit: Paper Antler

Now it’s over. The bride and groom returned from their honeymoon and drove their presents and their Persian cat (Smushie) back to St. Louis. The bridal bouquet is drying in the closet, the wedding dress back in dry-cleaner plastic. The question remains, “Was it worth it? Was my dad’s participation worth the cost of my health and enjoyment of the biggest day in our daughter’s life?” I honestly don’t know. We are called to honor our mother and father, but at what cost? We live by our choices in this life and hope for the best.

As I unpacked a zip-lock bag of leftover lace from the seamstress who remade my wedding dress into Jessie’s wedding dress, I thought of her reassuring words to our daughter, “If it doesn’t work out, you can always turn it into a christening gown for your first baby.” Well, it didn’t quite “work out” for me, but our daughter and her adorable groom said it was “the best day of their entire lives” and that was certainly the goal.

Life is a sacrament infused with the power of God. As long as we are breathing, there is another moment in life to celebrate. As long as the sun rises and sets, a jewel to behold.

For my friends who want the truly breathtaking photographer’s take on Jessie and Michael’s wedding, here’s the highlight reel with music. If you need a photographer for your family wedding you’ll see by this reel that there is no one like Paper Antler, www.paperantler.com Thank you to our dear friends Jonny and Michelle for seeing J + M’s wedding in a way that none of us and most especially me, could possibly have seen that day. Your photos are a huge gift to all of us. We love you and we hope everyone we know uses Paper Antler for their family wedding!

https://paperantler.pic-time.com/4KV7vWx9dD1TD

And… I’ve already moved on to thinking about that baby gown, wink-wink.

Maid of Honor Taylor and her “princess of the field.” Photo credit: Paper Antler

God’s Secret Trousseau

May 6, 2022 by Margaret Philbrick 3 Comments

For my flower obsessed friends, you probably already know this, but I’m just catching on. When it comes to all things beautiful God holds some pretty cool secrets that he waits for us to discover. For our part, we have to slow down and savor the details to find them.

For the last several months we’ve been deep into planning our daughter’s wedding. This is not a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants and wing-it wedding (is that even is a thing?). Oh no, this is a curated wedding that started the day she was born! Of course that sounds completely ridiculous, but in a way it’s true. My husband and I have invested countless hours praying for the future spouses of all of our children and when the first one finds the right one, life takes on a greener color. Dreams are thought through with an eye for relevance, romance and practicality, long tucked away boxes come out of the basement, creative juices of “lasting significance” flow. What can we make and contribute to the day that will carry meaning and joy across the span of their married life together?

When Jessie was born in Chicago, Charlie brought a dozen pink and red roses into our hospital room at Northwestern Memorial. Being a sentimental geek, I dried them and saved them for her wedding someday – as in 27 years later someday. Well, those dried roses are coming out of their little box, soon to be mixed with roses that her fiancé gave her. By God’s grace we will turn them into something magnificent. How did they not crumble into dust? Careful packing, a basement with just the right humidity and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s true statement, “God is in the details.” He is the grand curator, caring about everything, significant and insignificant to us.

While walking a pastoral lawn alongside Lake Michigan in the summer of 2020, Jessie told me that she thought she was going to marry Mr. Y. They had been dating for just over a year and to hear her say this was definitely a first. In a confident voice, reminiscent of Elizabeth Bennet she said to me, “I think I’d like marry him on this lawn, right here.” As we looked over “this lawn” wishes started popping into our eyes like stars, but just as our thoughts were about to fall off the cart-before-the-horse cliff, we noticed an antique key lying right between our feet in the grass. It felt like a God placed secret we randomly discovered, What was it for? What did it open? We picked it up and tried to unlock the nearby cabin door, nope. So we decided to keep it and pray over this key. Would she marry Mr. Y. on “this lawn” someday in the future? What secrets might this key hold?

Fast forward to her first bridal shower in her hometown. There we sat in our springtime print dresses on a grey sprinkling morning surrounded by bridesmaids and longtime friends. Nothing in my life can match the friendships of women who have raised all their children together in the same town, same school, somewhat the same church and practically as neighbors. We have cried at each others’ kitchen tables over the terrible things our kids have done, walked our dogs in forests, rejoiced at every graduation and all of life in-between. Our circle of blessing around this bride-to-be included meaningful, handmade gifts I couldn’t have imagined, practical gifts every bride and groom need to start their lives, and plenty of flowers, quiche and coffee. Our lovely hosts gave the M.O.B. (Mother of the Bride) and bride a bouquet to take home as we waltzed out the door laden with Crate and Barrel boxes.

I’m one week into cutting the stems shorter on that bouquet and refreshing the water and it looks just as new as on that April Shower day. When I pulled it apart to toss out some crinkling eucalyptus, I noticed an almost invisible flower that did not appear in the mass of white hydrangea, scabiosa, lisianthus, and roses. If you pry open the hydrangea bracts, hidden deep inside is a blue star flower! It looks nothing like the rest of the bodacious blooms. It reminds me of a miniature love-in-the-mist which I grew from seed for our perennial garden years ago. There is an antique, tested beauty across the ages of time quality to it. It screams, “I don’t care if you don’t see me, I’m content hiding my glory.” This flower within the flower is a counter-cultural hidden gem in a society that disposes of the less than perfect, the wilting. I might have missed it if I had thrown away the flowers when they began to fade. And this Blue Willow china blue color is the accent color for the wedding flowers, bridesmaids dresses…all the things.

Intricate, unseen treasure inside a flower

God has a gracious and abundant trousseau waiting for us to unpack and discover. We hide things away and we forget about them and sometimes it takes a key found in the grass to set a new day in motion and cause us to see things we’ve been missing or remember what we’ve been keeping away all our lives.

I wish all the mother’s that I know a blessed Mother’s Day, filled with the love of your children and God’s secrets uncovered in the unlikeliest of places.

Building 2020

February 24, 2020 by Margaret Philbrick Leave a Comment

Often my husband and I walk our dog Snuggles and talk about the next thing we want to build, lately that conversation has centered around how our baby church plant is growing up, a new garage or filling the massive potholes where we park our car. Building is tangible, it takes vision and resources and you can touch it when it’s done. Yet, there is something satisfyingly intangible about this process. You can’t be entirely sure how it’s going to turn out and unplanned obstacles interfere along the journey, causing a shift in thinking and dollars. This requires flexibility and creativity on the part of the builders. “How could we value engineer this to get the same result, but not incur the significant up-charge?” A question forever plaguing and refining the building project.

When we built our home in northern Wisconsin the power generator established by the developer sat out on the road and it turned out we needed to add an (unplanned) new junction box closer to the house. The power was too far away since we chose to put the house in the back of the lot. This meant that the limestone apron we hoped to wrap around the entire base of the house got axed. The money for the stone now went to the new power source, an aesthetic sacrifice for a practical reality. Our creative minded general contractor said, “Let’s still put in the extra thick foundation and that way if you want to add the stone apron in the future, you can.” Problem solved, with an eye to the future solution.

My first experience with the joy of building things hit me in sixth grade at Jill Oddy’s slumber party. Jill lived in my favorite house in our neighborhood a couple of blocks from ours. Her parents gutted it, kept every rich historical detail and updated the color scheme with tons of Swedish blue and yellow florals, toile wallpaper, and painted tiles featuring peasant village scenes around the fireplace. Her birthday party occurred between the old wallpaper coming off and the new wallpaper going up and her parents let us write ALL OVER the stripped down walls. Profound quotes by Oscar Wilde, the Bible and Shakespeare would underlay their new decor. Just kidding, “I LOVE MICKEY AND MICKEY LOVES ME,” written inside giant hearts conveyed the sentiments of these pre-teen girls. Just as Snuggles marks her territory on our morning and evening walks, we long to do this as well.

When our church bought a 98,000 square foot warehouse to convert into a gorgeous, post-modern sanctuary, we held a candlelit assembly to worship in the emptiness and mark the old concrete floor and steel girders prior to renovation. We covered that decrepit Alcoa factory in Bible verses written in permanent ink Sharpies. Beneath today’s creamy, ceramic tile those unseen verses undergird the congregations’ walk with Christ. Twenty years after Jill Oddy’s slumber party we wallpapered our own dining room walls in floral yellow and blue and my husband and I wrote life-changing messages all over our own stripped down walls, “C.P. + M.P. – True Love 4-Ever.”

All of this takes me to Nashville a couple of weeks ago. Our youngest son is about to graduate with a music degree from Belmont University and he is involved in a couple of bands who record at “The Basement Space” studios. This start-up began literally in the basement space of a home the brothers lived in during college and beyond. The business grew and they are about to christen their trendy looking, take-your-breath-away recording studio behind the house. We toured this work in progress and took in the writing on the walls…

The owner’s face beamed as he told us about how the builders, a father and son team had experienced a significant growth in their faith since working on the project and they also wanted to contribute messages to the walls. He talked about all the enhancements and expansions the new space will bring to their recording work and I could see energy and light wash over his face and our son’s smile as they contemplated future opportunities.

The new Basement Space Studio in Nashville

A dizzying amount of preparations take place prior to breaking ground and that is what Lent is all about. We are on the cusp of a season where the Lord wants to build new things in us prior to the celebration of Easter. When we submit to his desire to write on the walls of our hearts he builds new light and life into us, often by revealing the decaying darkness of our own hearts. Lent is a building work and it starts this Ash Wednesday. Come and break up some ground and prepare a room for him these next 40 days. The master builder is looking for people to take up his trowel and his towel.

A Back-to-School Existential Crisis

September 9, 2019 by Margaret Philbrick Leave a Comment

Today I turned the page on a fall tradition, school. No one is in school! After decades of teaching writing, or packing my children’s backpacks, or heading off to school myself, I’m sitting at my writing desk sans school. We live in a new city, in the midst of an enormous college campus and with that move I relinquished the routine of going to Chalkboard to buy school supplies, grade papers, start the fall season fresh and clean, learn an abundance of new names and faces. I confess, this is somewhat of an existential crisis that I didn’t anticipate so what is a writer and a teacher to do? Write about it.

This past —ouch! I just said “past” summer, my spiritual reading centered around Thomas Merton. He and Mr. Oswald Chambers have some pretty wise things to say about what to do when one is suffering from a no more back-to-school crisis, or any obstacle that lands in the way of living life “normally” which we all know doesn’t really exist. A better way of describing it would be a disruption in living a productive life within the design that God has given or allowed over a pattern of time, a life we are accustomed to. Chambers says:

“You can see God using some lives, but into your life an obstacle has come and you do not seem to be of any use. Keep paying attention to the Source, and God will either take you around the obstacle or remove it. The river of the Spirit of God overcomes all obstacles.”

“Keep paying attention to the Source.” Since that’s good news and applicable to my current life situation I wanted to capture it in my journal. I turned the page and discovered to my horror, that I’ve arrived at the LAST page of my beautiful journal. If you journal then you know the sick feeling of attachment disorder at the thought of getting a new one. Loving friends gifted me with this journal for Christmas in 2013. Five and a half years of love, loss, answered prayers and unresolved questions, poems, drawings, book recco’s, quotes, ideas, reflections …all the critically important aspects of life are captured in this volume, soon to be retired. My writing grew tiny, could I make the last page last until at least the end of the year? As Tom Collins, the author of Good to Great says, “confront the brutal facts” —I can’t.

So, I resigned myself to cracking open a new journal which seems fitting for stepping into a new season of life. One of my students gave me a grey, leather-bound beauty with gold embossed flowers on the cover. At the time I didn’t know it, but I’ve saved it for this season, this time of uncertainty and new beginnings. When this end of year teacher’s gift came across my desk, I’d never dreamed we’d be living here, or September would arrive without fresh faced students staring at me from behind their desks. When I told my husband of now 30 years about my crisis he simply said, “You are a writer, write.” Okay then, my new journal begins…

“Stay close to the Source and write” followed by this quote from Thomas Merton which compliments what Mr. Chambers says so well,

“The relative perfection which we must attain to in this life if we are to live as sons (and daughters) of God is not the 24 hour a day production of perfect acts of virtue, but a life from which practically all the obstacles to God’s love have been removed or overcome.”

Achievement obstacles, back-to-school expectations, impatience and impertinence that my design for my life isn’t what I expected, “practically all the obstacles…removed or overcome.” When I get to heaven, I’m going to ask Merton what he meant by, “practically all,” but for now, there’s Source-filled works to write with a purifying fire by my side.

Believing in New Shoots

April 4, 2019 by Margaret Philbrick Leave a Comment

Something new is springing up; we’re moving to a new state, getting to know a new town, rooting into a new community and while it’s exciting there is a bittersweetness. We’ve spent 29 years walking these creaky, oak floors and sharing one shower upstairs, boiling glass baby bottles and drying them overnight on these counters, watching each child come around the upstairs hall corner in footsie pajamas, just a little bit taller with each passing year.

We removed the corkscrew willow tree (which was dying) and put in a gigantic perennial garden marking each plant with an identifying stake. Our kids grew their first tomatoes and basil while the squirrels traversed the fence and ate all our corn. Even in their twenties, our sons climbed to the top of the gigantic Norway Spruce trees and cut out the branches so they could take in the view of our entire town. One summer afternoon, the boys coaxed me up there and what did I see? Nothing but a green canopy. Everything, even the houses and streets disappeared from view, except for the trees. With a mere seventy foot climb my entire perspective changed. All concrete and cars, gone. I’d spent over two decades taking in a myopic, street level view. Little did I know the freedom lying in wait at the top of those trees for those willing to take the risk. I’m thankful for people who push me to reach “further up and further in” and that gets at the heart of what’s hard about digging up roots, it means saying goodbye to the other plants in our garden, our people.

There are a handful who’ve brought out the best in us and sat beside us in our worst. They challenged us to live with meaning and purpose. They gave us their loyalty and love, their already overextended hearts. Our next- door neighbors came over the day we arrived home from the hospital and held and admired each precious new addition to our family. Our pastor and his wife were the first people we called when my husband lost his job. Our wine drinking friends commiserated with us and celebrated teenage trials and triumphs. Our travel buddies loved our daughter and even came to see her dance in her new city with her first dance company, who does that? We’ve laughed until we cried about summer camp experiences, our kids getting lost together and backpacking their way through homesickness and swarms of mosquitos. These are people you actually want to spend your summer vacation time with. Why would we leave them?

The answer lies in trusting the underground work and the above the treeline vista. We’ve lived many springs and we know that the hyacinth and daffodil do not fail. We know that snowdrops bloom the last week of February, regardless of the weather and we hear the first cardinal summoning his mate right around Valentine’s Day each year. We can trust the unseen worker for new friends, a new job, our new place in this world because “He is making all things new.”

I bought a bouquet at Christmas with corkscrew willow branches as an accent. After the amaryllis flowers died I went outside to throw the bouquet away, but noticed that one of the branches generated roots. All that work going on inside the vase as we opened our presents and entertained our guests with Door County Cherry Bounce cocktails. Long after Christmas returned to basement boxes, I planted the new tree in a pot and here on the cusp of spring I own a new tree. A piece of home to carry to our new home. We cut down a corkscrew willow over 25 years ago and now we leave with a new one. New life, new adventures, new hope in what we may find out there on the lake…

“I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now…Come further up, come further in!” ― C.S. Lewis, The Last Battle

“It All Goes Back in the Box” for a New Adventure

January 11, 2019 by Margaret Philbrick Leave a Comment

John Ortberg tells this story of playing a board game with his grandma and at the end of the game she waxes poetically about this truth, “It all goes back in the box.”* As our kids returned to their respective post- holiday lives, we sat amidst piles of dry pine needles and a coffee table covered with ornaments and packed up Christmas. We’ve all done it. Gone are those carefree, clueless days when we obliviously trotted back to school while someone else at home put Christmas away. It’s a bummer reality of January, dragging the tree out to the curb and staring at its lost glory, accentuated by all the other forlorn friends waiting for the mulch maker.

But this is 2019, the year of throwing things out and packing treasures back in the box for a new adventure, we are moving! Yes, we are leaving debt-dripping, tax-crippling Illinois for the pristine Wisconsin lakes. The main reason for this uprooting after 27 years in our french country cottage? The church which we’ve been nourished in for 21 of those years is planting a new church and we get to be a part of it! We’re already investing in flannel shirts and wool skirts, the ones they wear with patterned leggings and heavy tread construction boots. How does one describe this outward bound, earthy look? Our kids are calling our new home 221b Baker street because they say it looks like where Sherlock Holmes and Watson live, and a condo means — no more weeding!

Most people stare in shock and say, “How can you leave?” as if our corner of the world is paradise found. In many ways this green tree corridor of Dupage County is a paradise of a place to raise kids, but we’re nearly done with that process (you’re never really done), and the parents are longing for a new challenge and the joy of seeing God work in wondrous ways in new lands. There’s a cool pilgrim-explorer ethos about it, leaving the beloved and familiar for unchartered territory. Our hope is that we’ll love the one who’s leading us even more deeply and the people he puts around us with abandon. If we’re lucky we’ll also write some compelling stories, songs, poems and maybe even a mystery in 221b Baker Street. Stay tuned and if you’re dying for a French Country cottage with a red tile roof it goes on the market in March. Happy New Year!

Found in John Ortberg’s book, When the Game is Over, It All Goes Back in the Box