Today, my dear friend Dr. Dorie came over to cure me and my blog of what’s been ailing us. She’s not really a doctor—she’s actually a web developer and mom and generally crafty person (I’ve written about her before, mostly in the post Seder in Farmer City). But I can assure you, my blog and I both feel much better after Dorie’s visit.
First, I poured two cups of coffee and we commiserated about how blogging and social media anxieties remind us a bit too much of the anxieties we felt at 14. (Dorie’s fabulous blog is Tumbling Blocks. While you’re there, read the sweet story behind the quilt she make for her daughter.) So that was the much-needed therapy part of today’s session.
Then Dorie went to work on my blog, which has been about as bare-bones as it could be since I launched it at this address in July. I like simple and clean, but I’m not so much a fan of lame. There’s more to be done, but as you can see, Dorie accomplished a lot just today, moving the blog away from the standard template design I started with toward something that’s more meaningful and more me.
The most obvious addition to the blog is the banner. There’s a story that goes with the illustration, which we used on our wedding invitation. The building on the left is our church, where Jason and I met and where we got married about 17 months ago; the one in the middle is a favorite club/bar in town, which we rented out our post-wedding celebration; and on the right is our home, where we parent, cook, garden, love, play and sometimes cry. (We had T-shirts made with the illustration, too, for all of our friends and family who pitched in to help with our wedding.)
It’s pretty clear why we dreamed up with this concept for our wedding invitations. But I’ve decided it’s also a perfect way to illustrate what living a life in between is all about—at least for me (it probably is, and should be, a bit different for you). If you look closely at the illustration, you can see it’s a continuous line drawing, like a single thread connecting everything. It says a lot about how I feel about life now. I don’t want to parse my life (or my writing) into neat categories, with nice, separate communities of people assigned to each. As I wrote a while back in the post Worship in a warehouse, it’s all about creating “a foundational harmony in my life—in my relationships, in my waning sense of want and need and restlessness, and in my true self. Whether I’m at the bar or church or home.”
(By the way, here’s a huge, public thank-you to Dorie. As we discussed what kind of look I was after for the blog, and she worked and we laughed, I kept wanting to hug her, but knew that would slow her progress. Instead, I thought about how to repay her. It started, in my mind, with the thought of taking her out for some really good drinks. The more work she did, the more my thoughts progressed: A nice dinner. With dessert. And maybe I’ll knit her a scarf or felted purse while I’m at it.)
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