create Archives - Kathryn Rankin Covington

Summertime

It’s almost upon us.

In Michigan, the trees have burst into full bloom and color has saturated the landscape. That nearly-forgotten brush of heat strokes our bare shoulders when we step into the sunlight.

Our kids are holding impromptu baseball games in backyards, racing through the twilight on bikes, begging to delay bedtime just ten minutes more.

Students are torrents of emotion, finishing those last lessons and holding tight to the community they’ve built with their teachers over the last nine months, even as their words say they can’t WAIT for school to be over.

As parents, we look forward to time with our babies, big and small. Our stress begins to melt as we look at calendars that aren’t packed with events from dawn til dusk. Some of us look forward to a bit of travel, some of us prepare that pool bag, and some of us look longingly at weeks of camp ahead. Regardless of our family plans, we are all about to transition. It’s summer: we’re supposed to feel excitement and relief! And yet, trepidation hides in the shadows.

Summertime can be driven by the things that make you happy.

Read On

Unburied

I gazed at the mountain of plastic bags and felt anger flow through my veins. We’d spent months donating and selling our stuff. An actual truck had come to haul half a house of furniture away. How was there this much left for the landfill? All of the plastic plush precious things I thought were so important were now shoved in black bags, off to pollute the Earth. I shook my head.

What had we been doing?

When the good husband and I got married, we combined our lives into one unified household, stuffing the past in the basement. As our lives expanded, the boxes of stuff accumulated and got put away in bigger and bigger basements. Eight years later, we made the big decision to move home to Michigan. We also made the choice to value location over square footage. This meant a big downsize.

It was time to face the Stuff.

“It doesn’t matter what objects leave our lives; the experiences are still there.”

Read On

IMDb For Books

Volume 1

The good husband had a brilliant thought this week: what if there was an IMDb for books?

You know when you finish a movie or – le gasp – a TV series and you’re in denial that it’s actually over, so you hop onto IMDb to read all the trivia?

Would this not be so much fun???

Wouldn’t it be cool to know if Harry Potter’s name was originally Steve? Or if J.R.R. Tolkien’s famous ring was based on toe-ring his wife bought on their honeymoon? Or, what if the publisher of “Little Women” had really pressured Ms. Alcott to change her title to “Dutiful Girls” but she was a pioneering feminist who said “No, these characters are strong, independent women, even if they are young?”

I visited the Gone With the Wind Museum with one of my best friends and found out that Margaret Mitchell broke her leg, got bored sitting around and was like, “Eh, maybe I’ll write a book.”

Are you kidding me????

Read On

The Road Home

I gazed out of the car window, trying not to sigh audibly. The landscape was dismal and gray, no semblance of sun. When we left Atlanta that morning, the airplane rose gracefully over fields of fuchsia crepe myrtle and creamy silk magnolia blooms winking among the dark waxy leaves. Spring arrives early in the South, waltzing beautifully in after short, mild winters.

But I was no longer in the South. I was home. In Michigan.

…in March.

Everything was weary, from the clouded sky to the dead ground to the haggard, frustrated face of the puffer-coat swathed woman who had snapped at my children as we shivered in the cold, awaiting my husband’s arrival.

The drive to my husband’s hometown, what was to be our new hometown, was mercifully brief. I looked up at the gray trees and tried to imagine them as they would be in Michigan spring, two months hence. Delicate green and yellow leaves, flecked birch bark, the distinct sweetness of fragile Michigan warmth in the air. A bit of white on the dormant trees caught my eye and I smiled. Perhaps it had snowed. Our young kids would love the snow. Sledding, skiing, building snowmen; these were their inheritance. Maybe this would all be ok.

“I laid down a life-long shackle: fear.”

Read On

Volume 1

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