It’s okay to start messy. You just have to start.

Ashes in Ink

4 hours ago

Nope…🤣 ... See MoreSee Less

Ashes in Ink

2 weeks ago

I have always loved Tiffany lamps.

Of course, not actual Tiffany lamps. I do not have actual-Tiffany-lamp money. I mean the stained-glass sort—the ones with jewel-colored pieces fitted together beneath a dark web of lead, throwing little pools of ruby and amber and blue across a room. I have loved them for as long as I can remember. There is something about stained glass that has always seemed a little bit holy to me, even when it was sitting on an office desk next to a stack of paperwork I was dreading or a grant proposal that wasn’t about to write itself.

For years, I had a Tiffany-style lamp on my desk at a job I loved. The lamp was already there when I moved into the office, which meant it wasn't mine. It was borrowed, and while no one else ever really laid claim to it, I am a reasonably law-abiding Southern woman, and I understand that "it has been on my desk for years" never quite granted ownership.

Still, I loved that little lamp. I loved sitting in the dark at my desk before my coworkers arrived and the soft light it cast over my workspace. Small, beautiful things are not to be taken for granted.

It sat there through work I cared about, conversations that mattered, hard days, good days, laughter from the hallway, and all those ordinary Tuesdays you never really treasure enough while you're living them. There came a day when the job was done, and I remember looking at the lamp as I left, still on the now almost-empty desk, waiting for whatever, or whoever came next. I left the building before the tears came in torrents.

There have been other stained-glass lights I have loved, too. There is a house that I lived in that held so much possibility and joy when I arrived there and noticed Tiffany-style fixtures that cast the warmest light. I loved those lights. And then there came a day when I had to leave them behind, too.

Life has a habit of doing that. You fall in love with a place, a job, a room, a person, a version of your life. You settle into it. You arrange your photographs and learn which floorboard creaks and decide that this particular patch of earth is where you belong.

Then life clears its throat and says, “Ma'am, we're going to need you to move along.”

You can ask why, but you have no choice but to get moving.

But hindsight has shown me something I couldn't have known when I was walking away from things I loved: there was so much more light ahead.

I considered that as I stood in that church in Aberdeen, Scotland, where my family had left something behind nearly four hundred years before I arrived.

I had come a long way to get there. A very long way. By the time Dad and I reached Aberdeen, I had spent nine hours on a train completing a journey that was supposed to take about an hour by plane. Nine hours is plenty of time to contemplate your life choices, the airline's life choices, and whether your ancestors might have had the common decency to come from somewhere easier to reach.

But thirteen generations ago, my ancestor John Burnett was baptized at the Kirk of St Nicholas, and I had come all the way from Tennessee to stand where part of my story began. I thought John might be buried there, too, so Dad and I wandered through the churchyard reading tombstones, squinting at names and dates that had survived several hundred Scottish winters with varying degrees of success.

We did not find John.

In fact, we didn't find a Burnett at all.

This seemed a little inconsiderate of my ancestors. If you're going to leave descendants scattered around the world, some of whom might eventually cross an ocean and endure nine hours on a train to look for you, the least you can do is leave a clearly legible tombstone.

Then we tried to get inside the church.

That wasn't particularly promising, either.

The Kirk of St Nicholas, the Mither Kirk, Aberdeen's ancient mother church, looked considerably more interested in keeping me out than welcoming home one of its long-lost Tennessee descendants. Parts of the building appeared boarded up. The office was sealed. There was no obvious entrance and, so disappointingly, no sign saying, AMERICAN WOMAN SEEKING DEAD RELATIVE: RING HERE.

Dad and I walked around the building. Then I walked around it again. I had just spent nine hours getting there, and I wasn’t quite ready to just walk away.

And that was when I saw the doorbell.
I rang it, honestly expecting nothing. Instead, the door cracked open, and there was Iain.

He had been getting ready to leave for the day. He had things to finish, places to go, and absolutely no obligation to entertain a woman from Tennessee who had appeared at quitting time asking questions about a man who had been dead for centuries. But Iain heard my accent. He heard how far Dad and I had come.

And he opened the door.

I didn't know it then, but that turned out to be the most important thing I found that afternoon.

Not a grave. A door.

And someone willing to open it.

Iain allowed me to wander while he finished a few things, then came back and began showing us the kirk. He pointed out tapestries and effigies and details I would have admired without ever understanding. He told stories. He explained that worshippers once paid for their pews, with money and social standing helping determine where a person sat.

Naturally, this made me wonder where John Burnett sat, assuming he worshipped there as an adult. Was he important enough for a good pew? Did he care? Did he sing? Did he sleep through sermons? Did he sit in the cheap seats and silently judge the people who had paid for the expensive ones?

These are the things genealogy records stubbornly refuse to tell you. Dates are useful, but I would trade several dates for one good story.

Dad couldn't manage the steep stairs to the balconies, so at one point he stayed below while I climbed. When I came back down, he was sitting quietly toward the back of the church, praying.

I had come looking backward. Dad, I think, was simply present.

I treasure the memory of him sitting there.

Then Iain disappeared for a few minutes and came back with the sort of question that should never be asked of a curious woman who has crossed an ocean looking for dead people.
"Do you want to see something cool?"

Sir.

I have crossed the Atlantic Ocean, survived a nine-hour train ride, circled this church twice, rung a mysterious doorbell and climbed your stairs in pursuit of a man who has been dead for centuries.

Of course I want to see something cool.

He took us into St John's Oil Chapel.

And there was the light.

The chapel sits within some of the oldest fabric of the kirk, a place whose story stretches back into medieval Aberdeen. Inside, the warmth of Tim Stead's extraordinary wooden furnishings softened all that ancient stone.

And then there was the stained glass.

Of course there was.

Because apparently, I can travel thousands of miles from Tennessee, chase a thirteenth-great-grandfather through a Scottish churchyard, fail completely at the task I came to accomplish, and God will still find a way to put stained glass in front of me.

The window by Scottish artist Shona MacInnes tells the story of Aberdeen and the northeast—its rivers, farming, fishing, civic life and the offshore industry that changed the city. It isn't simply decoration. It is memory made visible.

The chapel also holds a Book of Remembrance for those who died working offshore in British waters, and Iain told us about the people remembered there, including those lost in the Piper Alpha disaster. Suddenly my missing tombstone didn't seem quite so urgent. I had come searching for one name belonging to one man who died centuries ago. Here was a place built, in part, around the sacred act of remembering names.

And above it all was stained glass.

Pieces. That's what stained glass is, after all. Pieces. Individual fragments that don't look like much when separated from one another. Some dark. Some brilliant. Some clear. Some colored so deeply that you can't imagine light ever getting through them.

Until it does.

That afternoon, standing in an ancient kirk in Aberdeen, I began thinking about all the pieces of a life we leave behind. John Burnett left almost nothing I can touch, yet generations eventually carried his story all the way to me. I had left a lamp on an office desk. I had left stained-glass fixtures in a house. I had left jobs and rooms and addresses and versions of myself I once thought I would inhabit forever.

Some of those departures were my choice.

Some weren’t.

And I will confess that I have not always departed gracefully. There have been moments when I have wanted to tell God that I was perfectly happy with the current arrangement and saw no need whatsoever for His little remodeling project.

I liked that job. I wanted to live in a beautiful house. I liked that lamp and the glow that it cast over whatever my pen put to paper. Could we please leave well enough alone?

The answer, repeatedly, has been no.

And that has broken my heart more than once.

But there is a peculiar mercy of getting older known as hindsight. You begin to see that some of the things you thought were endings were really only pieces. That job led somewhere else. That house became part of my story rather than the whole of it. The rooms I cried over leaving eventually gave way to rooms I couldn't yet imagine. The people I have loved remain woven through me.

Even the old lamp on the desk taught me something, though it took Scotland to help me understand it: You don't have to possess a beautiful thing for its light to become part of you.

I guess it’s true of places, too, and of people.

It’s even true of the generations who came before us.

I don't possess John Burnett's story. I barely know it. I have records. Dates. A baptism. A handful of facts. I never knew his voice or what made him laugh. I don't know whether he was kind. I don't know whether he ever stood inside that kirk as a grown man and watched sunlight come through colored glass.

I don't even know where they put him when he died. (Lord knows, I looked.)

But I know that on one day centuries ago, somebody carried a baby named John Burnett into that place. And thirteen generations later, his daughter—in the broadest and most improbable sense of the word—came back.

With her father.

Dad sat in the back and prayed. I wandered around asking questions.

Which, come to think of it, is probably a pretty accurate reflection of how differently we each move through life.

And somehow, across centuries, oceans, migrations, marriages, births, deaths, heartbreaks, houses, jobs, and one truly ridiculous train ride, there we were.

Still part of the same window.

Different pieces. Same light.

I didn't find John's tombstone that day. I still hope I will. Iain pointed me toward records in Edinburgh that may someday answer the question, and there is enough genealogical stubbornness in me to believe this story isn't finished.

But not finding the stone was just a moment in the story. What it led to was more.

It led to a door. It led to Dad praying. It led to Iain choosing generosity when he could have gone home. It led to standing in a chapel devoted to remembering people whose families still speak their names.

It led back to stained glass.

All those separate pieces held together. All that light finding its way through.

I have spent parts of my life grieving things I had to leave behind. A lamp. A house. A job. People. Places. Versions of myself. At the time, some losses felt enormous. I could see only the piece being taken out of my hands. I couldn't see where it belonged in the larger picture.

That's the trouble with being inside your own life: You stand too close to the window.

Hindsight lets you back up.

And perhaps, sometimes, you finally see it.

The dark lines weren't ruining the picture. They were holding the pieces together. The broken-looking edges weren't evidence that everything had gone wrong. They were part of the design.

And the light I thought I was leaving behind? It kept showing up ahead of me. On another desk. In another home. Through another person. Across an ocean. Inside an ancient Scottish kirk where an ancestor of mine was baptized centuries before anybody could have imagined Tennessee, me, Dad, Iain, or the fact that one stubborn Southern woman would someday ring a doorbell at closing time looking for him.

Maybe that's legacy… Not possessing everything our people possessed. Not staying forever in the rooms where we were once happy. Not even knowing all their stories.

Maybe legacy is carrying the light forward.

I left the lamp. I left the house.

John left almost everything I would ever want to know about him somewhere beyond my reach.

And one day, I will leave things behind too. We all do.

But perhaps the beautiful things were never ours to keep. Perhaps they were ours to stand beneath for a while. To notice. To love. To let their colors fall across us.

… perhaps with the purpose of carrying a little of that light into whatever room comes next.

Stained glass has to be stained to become what it is.

And maybe we do, too.
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The gentleman who so kindly let us into the Kirk is Iain Sneddon, Chief Operating Officer of Scot-Art, a charity working to breathe new life into overlooked and underused spaces. Their work is about more than restoring buildings, it’s about creating places where community can take root, creativity can flourish, and much-needed local services can find a home.

And that, perhaps, is the real beauty of saving a place like the Kirk: preserving what has been while making room for what might come next.

If you want to know more about Scot-Art, you can visit their website here: www.scot-art.co.uk/ ... See MoreSee Less

Ashes in Ink

3 weeks ago

Abbey tells me It's National Raccoon Day, so I'll just leave this here:I have waited my entire life for this moment.

For decades, society has celebrated tall people. And thin people. And graceful people. And people who can sit in an airplane seat without worrying about overlapping their allotted space. But at long last, Gentle Readers, it is our time.

If you haven’t met Jimothy, allow me to introduce you to Seattle’s newest celebrity. Jimothy is a raccoon who appears to have what is called short-spine syndrome. He’s built a little differently than your average trash panda. His body is short, his legs are long, and he walks as if someone had accidentally assembled him from IKEA parts without the instructions.

America is absolutely in love.

Millions of people have watched videos of this little guy simply existing. He’s not juggling. He’s not solving math problems. He’s not hosting a podcast. He’s just waddling around Seattle looking adorable, and suddenly he’s more famous than half the people on reality television.

As one who has also spent a lifetime being vertically economical and, let’s be honest, a bit horizontally enthusiastic, I feel represented.

I’ve never been built for speed. My people don’t glide into rooms; we arrive. If I fall, I don’t bounce. I settle. I’ve accepted that if I ever take up jogging, the neighborhood Facebook page will likely start to panic, thinking they’ve somehow fallen into an alternate timeline.

And yet, here comes Jimothy, proving what I’ve secretly suspected for years: Being short and round isn’t a flaw. It’s branding.

There's nothing not to love about him. Jimothy isn’t trying to be anything other than Jimothy. He’s not wishing for a different body. He’s not comparing himself to the cover models in Modern Raccoon Monthly. He’s simply living his little raccoon life, climbing fences, looking for snacks, and unintentionally reminding the rest of us that different isn’t something to hide.

It’s something people remember.

I’ve spent enough years worrying about fitting in to know this much is true: The things we spend our lives apologizing for are often the very things people end up loving about us.

It’s your laugh, your delightful accent, your crooked smile and the gap between your front teeth. It’s your goofy stories. It’s your stubborn optimism. It’s your extra twenty pounds, or your missing twenty pounds. It’s your weird little habit of stopping to pet the baby goats when they mysteriously appear on the land beside the service station you frequent. (Please tell me I’m not the only one—Also, don’t mention this to my husband, who insists the goats are there to clear the overgrowth and not because the universe has finally provided me with my own personal roadside petting zoo.)

The world doesn’t need another perfect person. We’ve already got plenty of polished. What we’re short on is genuine.

The older I get, the less interested I am in impressing people and the more interested I am in connecting with the ones who matter. Nobody has ever written to tell me they appreciate my flawless appearance, mostly because they’ve seen me. But they do write because something I said reminded them of home, made them laugh, made them cry, or helped them believe they weren’t walking through life alone.

And lately, something especially strange has happened.

Somehow (and I truly don’t know how) I have become just famous enough that some people in Scotland know who I am.

Now, I’m not movie-star famous. I’m not “security escort through the airport” famous. I’m more like, “Someone in Glasgow might point and say, ‘Isn’t that the lass who wrote that story?’” famous.

I have embraced it as the perfect level of celebrity. No paparazzi. No requirement for bodyguards. No one asking for a selfie at dinner on date night. One gentleman who wrote said, “You should realize you are mildly famous here at the moment,” which is just enough recognition to make me grin every time I remember there are folks six time zones away reading something I wrote, perhaps enjoying tea and a fabulous scone.

Who knew?

Certainly not the awkward girl in the ripped jeans and combat boots who spent most of her adolescence trying to make herself small enough not to be noticed or tormented by those who seemed to have a better grasp on life altogether.

I’ve always known God has a sense of humor. One day, you’re standing in a line waiting to meet Sean Dietrich and wondering if you might just be able to write essays of the same caliber. The next, people in Scotland are reading your stories, and a raccoon resembling a furry bowling ball is getting his own official celebration in Seattle.

You can’t make this stuff up. (Life is so much better than fiction, don’t you think?)

That’s the kind of famous worth having. Not the kind that requires bodyguards or dark glasses or someone shouting your name while you’re trying to buy toilet paper. The kind that means your words traveled farther than you ever imagined they could. The kind that tells you someone, somewhere, felt a little less alone because you were finally brave enough to sound like yourself.

I have been thinking a lot about authenticity lately, and it’s pretty obvious to me: that’s Jimothy’s real gift. He reminds us that you don’t have to look like everyone else to make people smile. You don’t have to move like everyone else, sound like everyone else, or fit neatly into the shape the world had in mind for you.

Sometimes the very thing that makes you different becomes the reason people remember you.

So, if you’ve spent your life wishing you were taller or thinner or younger or prettier or more successful or less wonderfully weird, take a lesson from one delightfully round little raccoon, and perhaps this slightly less delightful but determinedly as round writer.

Be yourself. Walk your own funny walk. Own your shape, your story, your scars, your quirks, and your beautifully imperfect life.

Because in a world full of copycats, the originals are the ones we fall in love with... something worth remembering when we’re looking in the mirror.

Besides, if a short, round raccoon can become an international celebrity, there’s hope for the rest of us.

#jimothy #ashesinink #NoScotlandNoParty #authenticity ... See MoreSee Less