Home home on the raaaaaaaange...

Or the electric grill. Either way.

I'm back in North Carolina with the family, knee-deep in kidlets, cats and crumbs. I got up early today and made an epic Father's Day breakfast, since tomorrow they'll all be off to Mass at the butt-crack of dawn, as one of my more poetic brothers likes to say. It turned out wonderfully, and there is something rather terrible and thrilling in the sheer amount of food involved in a Father's Day Breakfast Feast for Fourteen. 2 dozen eggs, 2 loaves of toast, 3 lbs of bacon, 2 gallons of orange juice, 15 cups of waffle-mix (from scratch, mind!), a pot of coffee, and 2 pots of tea. Of course, roughly half of that made its way down the gullet of my 18 year old brother, who from infancy has had the appetite of a starved and blood-scenting great white shark. And there were a few left over waffles to dip in bacon drippings and feed to Finnegan the Big Mutt.

The trip over here was a bit bizarre. All that needs to be said about it is summed up in this: the 30 passenger plane had its own descent music, which blasted from overhead speakers like the deformed spawn of a drunken evening with John Williams and Enya as we dropped out of the sky. The joys of blue-light travel!

The baby is adorable and likes me very much. She is not yet two months old, but she's very engaging and interactive. She makes eye contact and smiles and squirms and flails and makes noises with intent. I know gas, and I know conversation, and this is the latter. She loves to be sung to, and in less than 24 hours here, I already hold the record for putting her to sleep (after my mom, of course.) She looks different from all of our other babies - less immediately beautiful, but with fuzzy red hair and a very intelligent and humorous expression which add cuteness until she's impossible. It took me a while to warm up to the last baby (now the world's funniest 2 year old monkey) but I fell in love with Elsa right away. You can tell already that she's going to be a tough, smart little cookie.

So far tensions are remaining pretty low. My 13 year old sister came up to me out of nowhere last night and announced defiantly:

"I know for a fact that God doesn't hate war. 'Cause he told Joan of Arc to go to war. So there."

I raised an eyebrow and continued to silently wash the dishes. What can you say to that? It was both troubling and amusing. Apparently someone had briefed her on the peace testimony and she'd gone off in a corner to think about it, and why it must be wrong. My teenage brother, schooled rigorously in the rhetoric of apologetics, as I was before them, have tried to engage me in the sort of "if=then" pseudo-logical equations, heavily scented with C.S. Lewis, which turn us into snake-oil lawyers instead of saints. I answered in historical facts about Quakers, trying to steer clear of theology. Then they asked me my political affiliation, and I gave them a wink and a comic-arch "My kingdom is not of this world." Eventually, they realized I wasn't going to be much fun to bait on this subject, and we began to talk about computer games instead. My father seems to ignore the fact that I'm "fallen away", which I take as a mercy, and we've had some good, unstressful conversations about virtue. My mother peppers her conversation with plain speech, which is pretty cute. My brothers are amused by the plain dress, and my little sisters are intrigued. My mom likes it. My dad hasn't noticed.

Silence and solitude are not to be found here, even hiding in the toilet, but I have discovered that I can get a lot of peace and inner focus by throwing myself into the housework. It's the oldest trick in the book, but I never did discover the Zen of the Dishpan when I was looking for it. In a small house, with so many messy little people, a home business, two teen aged boys, and my mother struggling heroically with the demands of a new-born and c-section recovery, there is a never-ending supply of work. I am always astonished, every time I come home, about the back-breaking impossibility of keeping things going for more than 15 minutes at a time.

It doesn't look like I can make it to meeting this First Day, though I've really been wanting to visit some North Carolina meetings. I'm not sure what I'm going to do. If I stay home from Mass, my parents will leave the babies at home with me, so I won't be able to keep worship alone. If I go with them, I'm worried that my abstaining from communion will be a visual reminder of my change of faith which will pain my parents. I am not opposed to participating in the Mass, but I also know I'm considered unfit to receive communion by them, just by virtue of not having gone to Mass in a while. I'm praying about this, and I'd love it if my Friends and readers would, too. We'll see how way opens tomorrow.

I edited this post to add...I was looking at one of my old poetry anthologies and smiled to find this from Yeats:

On being asked for a War Poem

I think it better that in times like these
A poet keep his mouth shut, for in truth
We have no gift to set a statesman right;
He has had enough of meddling who can please
A young girl in the indolence of her youth,
Or an old man upon a winter’s night.