A Hard Row to Hoe

I'm interrupting the nice, orderly flow of those posts I scheduled to go up in order to catch up in real time.

This past week has been what my grandmother would have called "a hard row to hoe."

It was painful, it was scary, and I feel shell-shocked. I'm thrilled to be back at home after eight days in the hospital, but I still feel removed from the children and our little routines.

In his story "The Tell-Tale Heart," Poe's protagonist likens the old man's heart to "a watch enveloped in cotton," and those words rattle around in my head not just because they're awesome or because it's October and Poe is creepy but because here I sit, with a scrim of stitches and gauze pads and medication over all my essential mechanisms. Enveloped and surrounded and put away, for now.

Obviously, physical healing demands this kind of remove. It's good to slow down, good to pause, good to take it easy. But as with so much else in life, what's good in this case is what's difficult.

Help me, God, with what's difficult. And thank you for all that already has-- nurses in the hospital, friends calling or visiting and bringing meals, grandparents rearranging their schedules to stay here with Eva and Silas.

Time to do nothing and do it gallantly.