Dappled Things

By Liz Adair

Last Wednesday, I sat around a fake campfire with my seminary students, and we spent the entire fifty minutes taking turns saying what we were thankful for. It’s a yearly tradition. I bring as many blankets and pillows as I can fit in my car, and the kids snuggle in, wrapping themselves in the warmth of the quilts and the spirit of the Comforter that is surely there with us. Several of the kids say that it’s their favorite seminary lesson of the whole year.

So, I’ve had thankfulness on my mind, but I’ve been struggling with how to say what I wanted to say in this Thanksgiving blog. I went to bed mulling it over, and woke with “Pied Beauty” running through my head. This poem, written by Gerard Manly Hopkins, a 19^th Century Jesuit priest and poet, has always been a favorite of mine. It goes like this:

GLORY be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

As I woke to, ‘praise be to God for dappled things’ (well, yes, I quoted it wrong in my memory), I thought, That’s it! I’m sooooo grateful for the swift/slow, sweet/sour, adazzle/dim parts of my life. Lehi told his son Jacob that ‘it must needs be that there was an opposition in all things’ as we live our lives. He was speaking about choosing good from evil, but I think opposition can cast the good in bold relief and cause us to be grateful.

My seminary kids were blown away when I said I was thankful for pizza, because I was eighteen before I had my first taste of that delightful dish. Here are some other things I’m grateful for:

I’m thankful for copy machines. When I was sixteen and worked in the typing pool at the Bureau of Reclamation, you had three options for copies: 1) carbon paper, and woe betide the person who made a mistake, because you had to erase all those copies, too (and you’d better put a shield in, or your erasure would smudge the sheets lying behind), 2) thermo fax, the newest in copying, a heat-sensitive film that became brittle and disintegrated before the year was out, 3) copy-eze, also a technological breakthrough, a 3-part photographic process that resulted in a wet copy that wrinkled as it dried. Cumbersome as it was, we were grateful for the copy-eze, because that meant we could copy any document instead of having to create a copy on the typewriter.

I’m thankful for forced-air furnaces. Growing up in rural New Mexico, we had small (unvented) space heaters, and though I remember with nostalgia my knees burning as I sat close and stared at the patterned glow of the ceramic backing, I remember how cold my backside was at the same time. Long live central heating!

I’m grateful for the infrastructure we have for electric power and water. My father worked construction, and several summers we lived where there were no utilities. The company hauled water in on a truck, and we carried it to our domicile (one year a tent, another, a home-made trailer house) in a galvanized bucket. My father made a food cooler out of a frame covered with burlap bags that wicked moisture out of a pan and evaporated it into the air. My job was to wash the chimneys of the kerosene lamps we used in the evening. And, of course, our bathroom was at the end of a path into the woods.

I’m grateful for Skype. With that free, downloadable program and an internet connection, I can talk to my son, who’s studying in Egypt, for hours on end without charge. As soon as he gets a webcam, I’ll be able to see him. My gratitude for this is heightened as I remember my parents’ five years in Afghanistan where it took three weeks for a letter to arrive and no phone service was available at any price.

And phones! You don’t have to be very old to remember when there were no cell phones. But I remember lots of years without a phone in our house. And then, when we got one, we had a four-party line, and when anyone on the line got a call, it rang in every house. Our ring was two shorts and a long. I remember the joy of getting a single party line, where no one could listen in on my conversation, and I didn’t have to note the ring pattern to know if it was for me or not.

There are so many more things to remember, lights and darks in the pattern of my life. The sweets that are sweeter because of the sour, the dazzles that are brighter because of the dimness. I've touched on conveniences here rather than social and family relations, health, and economic well being, but there have been couple-colors there too, and I'm grateful for the hard times as well as the good.

I love Hopkins’ penultimate line, “He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change,” because of all that it suggests to me about the nature of God.

And I do praise Him.