I tarry summer. A floating timeline, I notch days, perpendicular lines pointing to significance, days I won't remember next summer, but will remember every day until then. I prolong each day from here until winter settles.

We wake and walk in morning, the humid fog resting on fields. We eat blueberry pie for breakfast, playing scrabble over coffee and cream. I cram cucumbers into quart jars and pour brine over their white middles turning gold in tumeric tinted vinegar. She pulls weeds from the garden spread. I sweep the side porch and wipe wet summer dust from white rockers. I finger my potted plants: they've come a long way from baby days in Tennessee. He's mowing the lawn, raking the leftovers, polka dots of grass littering our lawn. We grill dinner. I cut pound cake. I drive through wet streets with the sun pouring through breaking clouds. I am pensive.

A few have asked "Why the silence?" and my answer is formulated, I've practiced it; I've lied it because I don't even know the truth.

The real answer is because Silence is the portion of this season. Partly because I haven't asked. Partly because I haven't heard. Partly because I don't know what to ask. Partly because He's not speaking.

Mostly because I don't know what to say.

Tonight I sat in a meeting and watched a girl talk about Spending Her Life. She and her team wore shirts that read Young, Single, Available. It's not a dating advertisement, it's a lifestyle. She and more than a hundred others are spending their lives sharing the gospel with their peers in a country that doesn't take kindly to gospel sharing. She cried some.

My heart hurt listening to her. I saw myself three, four, five years ago. Passion being my drive and radical living my aim. I was ready to be stoned to death for my faith and easily committed to cutting off the arm, plucking out the eye, tossing out the CD and abstaining from anything possibly sin related. I was radical. I was sold out. I wasn't letting anything hold me back from the very best that the Lord had for me.

Now I want a coffee-maker, a couch, and a backyard.

And instead of any traces of the radical or any hope of the coffee-maker and couch, I inhabit half of a bedroom and tell myself that being faithful with the small things is being radical too.

But it doesn't feel like it.

In a three weeks I'll be driving down to Tennessee for the wedding of two more of The Makeshift Family. Sara and Steve this time. Arguably two people I can't imagine my life without. Arguably two people who shouldn't live their lives without one another. My bridesmaid dress arrived in the mail today and it seemed real. Over Thanksgiving weekend two more will tie the knot in North Carolina, Cara and Amos. I'll put on my trekking shoes once again and witness beautiful covenant take place, still thankful that all of our relationships don't require formal ceremony to solidify.

Just life. Lived together. I like that.