For those wondering how I am, I’m better. The warm February weather helps. There’s also a certain kind of magic in a Margherita pizza, especially when savored al fresco under the slanting rays of a winter sun—my wife Karen’s happiest place.

Karen and I are simple folk; she was born in the projects of Trenton, NJ, and I am sprinkled with Okie panhandle dust. This means our table manners are more suited to Charle’s Chips and boardwalk hoagies rather than Raoul’s in New York City. Nevertheless, we are not unbridled beasts. We have rules. There are only two when it comes to dining. 

• The first is to never eat at a chain restaurant while traveling. 
• The second is that when it is 70 degrees and sunny, take your supper al fresco.

That sunny al fresco meal recently was a rare respite in what had been a season of cold and hardship. It was a bleak winter at our house. I grew tired of stating my birthday like a kindergartner standing before the school nurse awaiting meds. A cancerous gland had to be removed, a reality I faced with some anxiety, but mostly surrender.

My recovery was difficult. I read a poem by the Irish poet, Seamus Heaney, that said you must not listen to history, but rather hope, hope this side of the grave for that once-in-a-lifetime tidal wave of justice to rise up and when it does, hope will rhyme with history. 

Throughout my convalescence, I reminded myself to embrace the pain of the moment, and that life would be better once I recovered. Hope was defined by enduring and managing pain, the interruption of my life was simply a speed bump. But perhaps it was not an interruption, but rather my actual life.

As C.S. Lewis once wrote in a letter to a friend, “The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life—the life God is sending one, day by day: what one calls one’s ‘real life’ is a phantom of one’s own imagination. This at least is what I see at moments of insight: but it’s hard to remember it all the time.” 

Dreams are indeed pockmarked by interruptions. We pray, hope, and long for something veiled. It only leaks out of us in moments, sitting in the sun eating Margherita pizza, no longer constrained by our vocabularies. We share our hopes and dreams with one another, sometimes using words, but mostly sharing the overflowing abundance of our hearts just by sitting together like turtles sunning on a rock after an insufferably cold winter. 

We are both survivors of cancer. Our bodies are not made to last forever. But we somehow want them to.

Our bodies move like the seasons. We sense winter viscerally, while spring, summer, and fall play out like a Vivaldi concerto. Even as we ache for the green shoots of spring, we find ourselves savoring these rare balmy February breezes.

While walking through her garden yesterday, Karen said, “It is remarkable how the volunteers (annuals, perennials, and weeds) are sprouting so quickly after the snow.” After dropping seeds last fall, these plants nudged by warmth and sun, rise up seeking life after lying beneath a blanket of ice and snow.

Karen bought the grandkids plastic shovels and rakes which they wield with little regard for the welfare of those within arms-length as they dig in the loam of raised beds. They are raking and shoveling with single-minded passion as if there could never be anything better than dirt.

The dirt is rich and filled with animal dung. “Don’t eat the dirt!” she tells them. And yet they do. They shape small clumps of moist, dark soil into doughy brownie shapes, presenting them to me with bright eyes: ‘Here go, Bubs.’ My grands call me Bubs. I take it with gleeful exaggeration, pretending to nibble it as they look at me curiously. I wonder how long I should hold it before I discreetly pitch it back into the garden, a gift returned to the earth. Amid the dirt-splattered chaos, these little interruptions whisper to us: joy is often found in the mess.

These are days of wonder, of mortality and new birth, of disease and new life, of tripping over the toys of children once again, of stumbling over the interruptions of doctors and nurses and medicine and pain. And yet, it is our time. A time to be born, a time to die, a time to till a garden, a time to play in the dirt.

A time to plant, a time to harvest. A time to laugh, cry, grieve, and dance. A time for scattering the rolled remnants of garden mud offered by children as treasure. A time to share pizza and talk of life and understand that this is our real life, a life full of interruptions that set into relief what goodness really is.

It is a life both remarkable and painful, and one that we thank God for every day. May we all find joy in life’s beautiful interruptions—whether a slice of pizza under the winter sun, a dirt clod offered by tiny, soil-stained hands, or simply the warmth of being near those we love.