A Week of Tears. A Week of Storms.

The Week of April 12, 2026

The willows are alive with red wing black birds. A squirrel ran across the road. Aiden alerted and pulled hard on the leash. I don’t see many squirrels at this part of the road. The squirrel colony is by our house—living in our trees with clumps of leaves as nests. Our multiple black walnut trees  keep them well fed.

Outside our bathroom window, I watch them run branches that I hardly believe hold their weight. They’ll fly between them. Play for the sake of playing. I’m as fascinated as if I were watching a model railroad set run through an intricate landscape.

I stop and listen to the water running into the culvert. The stream begins as drainage, a wide mud spot in the low part of the neighbor’s field, that becomes water on the other side of the road where I turn to face the sun. It has a name that I don’t remember. It’s been a long time since I’ve heard water moving. It’s been a long time since I’ve cried like this. 

Finally, I wept for Little Dog who passed last spring.

Have you ever done something you regretted? The kind where you rehearse the scene in your mind and wish you’d done it differently? And you’re pitched into a healthy dose of guilt, that swims up around you, so you don’t see the redwing black birds fluffing their wings and calling? So the days are gray with blessed rain, then they clear and each day becomes a threat of severe storms.

And your sense of your sinfulness blooms. Tears run like storms pouring rain down on a plowed field, water pushing trash into our hay field because there is no grass planted in the water way. My grief is like walking through a plowed field would bog you down, with weight and mud. Like that. My shadows lengthened. (Sometimes my sense of sin has been slight, like the sun over head,¹ tucking my shadow under my feet. But these last weeks the shadow has broadened to deep and so dark, stepping forward was like stepping into the mirey clay, the Psalmist talks about.)

Our pastor said we should fast during Lent. I’ve never heard a pastor preach on fasting before. Usually Lutherans have been challenged to add something, like extra prayer, or going to church. Many of my friends are Orthodox or Catholic, who take meat and dairy out of their diets to fast. They have advised don’t do this without advice from a spiritual father.

Our pastor suggested maybe we skip a meal or take some days off from eating. I know we’re called to fast and pray, but if you tell me to fast, I will eat. I will visit Culvers just for the ice cream. Saint Paul’s words: “For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do. Not want is what I keep on doing.”²

But I didn’t even want to fast. It’s taken years to make peace with food after trying to will my way into proper eating. Only when I found the freedom to eat anything I wanted, did I find moderation.

I bought books, some to support the author, so there’s now a stack of to be read books, thicker than the boxes of books I donated to the library. I bought dog equipment. Lent was a season of indulgence. So I’ve chocked up gluttony and materialism (all that buying).

Haunting dreams have returned. In one dream I turn down a light without touching a switch but tell someone his new age practices were a crock. He charged after me in an empty school building. I burst through a door. I screamed and woke to Bruce’s arms. We bought a van that Bruce calls a hearse. I wonder if ugly spirits, rode into the farm, in that thing.

I’ve become too aware of my own missteps, aware of my sin, in ways that are crippling. My shadows have cast long. I weep. The mud around my feet does not feel like the gospel of peace. No it feels like the suck of guilt. I suck guilt, even if I’m not guilty. I can feel guilty even if I didn’t do anything.

Aiden peed on the bed. I pull the sheets and threw them in the wash. Bruce asked what was the dog doing in the bedroom? I was changing clothes. He said nothing. I didn’t even feel anger coming off him.

We go for an evening walk. We see a pile of white and brown on the road. A kildeer has been hit by car. Bruce picks it up and tosses it in our field.

Even though spring is supposed to be the energizing time of new birth, all I want to do is go back to bed, maybe crack open a novel that takes me away. So we can chalk up acedia on the list.

I crack open Project Hail Mary and find a story that takes me to wonder, to cross cultural communication between an Eridian, who looks like a spider, and a human, both on a mission to save their species from their sun dying. The book makes me think of the myriad animals who perceive the world so differently they might as well be from another planet. It showed how there could be deep respect between a creature made of stone and heavy metals and one made of flesh and blood. Good reads are such a gift.

My feet are sunk so deep, the tears so overwhelming I ask for prayer from a friend I met through Frank Schaeffer and blogging.

My friend’s prayers opened up the truth in Psalm 94: 17 – 19 because sometimes you need someone to intercede:

“If Lord had not been my help, my soul would have lived in the land of silence. When I thought, ‘My foot slips’ your steadfast love O Lord held me up. When the cares of my heart are many your consolations cheer my soul.”³

The next morning I wake up in Bruce’s arms, the sunlight shining from across the house into our bedroom. I step on the solid, cool floor. I step on squares of light and look toward the window smeared with dog slobber. In the bathroom I watch squirrels running up branches that can barely hold them. They nibble on buds that have sprung into greens and yellows.

All week, storm chasers predicted severe weather. By late afternoon, we’d go under a tornado watch. I wait with anticipation and dread. It’s like dark gambling. Your place could strike it “rich” and be smashed by a tornado or high winds or tennis ball sized hail or the storms could run north or south of us. Early in the week I took the new dog crates to the basement. I put out the cat carriers. Packed up medications. Important papers. My computer. My jewelry. I wear my rings. I put Mrs. Horse in the barn with plenty of hay. And we’d wait and watch Ryan Hall Y’all talk about storms moving across the whole country. We step outside with the dogs to give them one last potty break before the storm hits. Light from lightning flashes against the barn. Thunder bangs high up. Our phone dings, a tornado warning for us. Ryan Hall mentions our town. He posts videos of tornadoes dropping like whirling, cruel ghosts, tossing dirt and debris. Our local news reporter walks through Lena, where a tornado smashed up the town. Finally, Bruce comes downstairs.

References

1 Somewhere I read the image of the sun overhead and feeling a slight sense of sin but I don’t remember where.

2 Romans 7:18 – 19, ESV

3 Psalm 94:17 – 19, ESV

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