Laurel Elisabeth Stevens

In each house we lived in growing up, I always knew where the photo albums were. In the house on Snag Lane in Spring, Texas they were in the wood-paneled living room, in one of the many built-in cabinets.  I could pull out the albums and wedge myself between the orange couch and the cabinets, leafing through memories. I would usually set aside the large album with paper pages and a blue and teal cloth cover.  This one held my parents’ wedding pictures, which I didn’t quite value at the time.  The photographs were black and white after all.  My favorites were an album with a cover that looked like basket weave, and one that had a slightly blurry close-up of white flowers on a background of leaves and stems. The photos were held down firmly on sticky pages underneath clear film.   Turning the pages was time travel—sometimes to moments remembered only in photos, others, to glimpses of events well-remembered. There’s one of a naughty two-year old me, try...

         I wrote this piece recently for a live story-telling show about motherhood called  Listen to Your Mother.  It was a wonderful  opportunity  to prepare this story and then read it to a live audience in San Antonio. I share it with grief and hope.  LS It was ten years ago this March—ten years ago that the doorbell rang sometime after seven in the evening on that Saturday night.  I was already upstairs getting ready for bed, feeling bulky and cumbersome at nearly 41 weeks of pregnancy.  Our three-year old daughter was sound asleep, and I resented this unexpected intrusion into a quiet evening with my husband John. Through the beveled glass of the front door I saw my parents and younger brother.  Why would they just drop in unannounced when they lived an hour away? I opened the door with a smile, trying to cover the curiosity and irritation I felt.  But when I saw their faces, my stomach churned. “W...

As our van drove up to the unofficial refugee camp, a group of children were already coming over to greet us.  “Hello!”  They practiced their new English with bright vowels.  “Nice to meet you!”    It was a beautiful spring day, and I was over the worst of the jet lag after traveling from Texas to Lebanon with a group of six others from my church.  On day four of our trip we had visited with Christians who were stretching themselves every day to serve refugees from their old enemy of Syria.  Now it was our turn to visit a camp and see it with our own eyes.  Fadil*, our guide for the morning, told us that we were invited by Nadia to visit her tent and talk with her.  The tent was one of hundreds and hundreds nestled close together just on the edge of town.  They were made of wood and covered with plastic, some covered with old billboard material—the walls of homes made from out-of-date advertising.  We took off our shoes an...

Alvin, Ralph and Virginia, circa 1946 We visited Grandma Virginia at the end of December on our road trip home from Michigan. She was asleep when we arrived around 4 in the afternoon--John, Elisabeth, Henry and I.  I was determined to see her though, so I decided to wake her up.  She sleeps plenty, I told myself.  I sat on the bed and said gently, "Hi Grandma, it's Laurel."  No response--she was sleeping soundly. I told John and the kids to go down the hall and enjoy a card game, and I sat with my grandma. I tried for a while to wake her up by gently rubbing her back and saying her name, but then that seemed like that was just not going to work . . . so I started singing.  "O come all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant . . ." it was still Christmas after all.  During the third verse she opened her eyes and turned her head toward me with a big smile. "That was beautiful!  When's the concert?" "Grandma that was the concert!" ...

I began Advent with many ideas of how we, as a family, would prepare for Christ’s coming, and some of them we carried through with.  Some of them we didn’t.  It was halfway through week 2 of Advent that I made an Advent wreath and we began lighting candles, but I never did get the traditional purple candles, and I’m finding that white looks rather like Easter.  The stories for the Jesse tree are read about every other day, and thoughts of, “Have I gotten all the right gifts?” too often clutter my mind in unproductive wanderings. There have been surprises though.  In working on the two previous posts I listened to many renditions of anthems, once again immersing myself in the story of the lyrics as well as the beauty of the music.  Elisabeth’s piano playing continues to delight me, and my mom has been playing as well—“What Child is This” and “Lo, How a Rose.”  Henry was in his room singing “O Holy Night” making up words to the parts he didn't know....

A week ago a new nephew entered our family.  His name is Charlie and he came one week early.  Nevertheless, it was a long wait.  After my sister-in-law had been in labor for nearly ten hours, the action pretty much stopped.  My brother texted me: “We’re kind of bored.”  I chuckled, and hoped he didn’t think I was condescending when I texted back, “Sleep now while you can.”  Waiting is hard. About ten years ago John and I were trying to sell a house and buy one in The Woodlands and I was always up and down with the good news-bad news of having a house on the market.  My dear husband tried to lighten my mood by quoting a line from The Simpsons one night: “Now we play the waiting game!” and answering himself with Homer’s line, “Awww, I wanna play Hungry, Hungry Hippos.”  So on a whim one night in a hotel we bought the game and probably caused no little annoyance to our neighbors as we drank glasses of wine and played that crazy noisy game....

Elisabeth has been working on a piano arrangement of O Come, O Come, Emmanuel , a hymn dating back to the 12th or 13th century as a Latin plain chant.  Many renditions hearken back to monks chanting in hallowed halls, “Veni, Veni Emmanuel,” but the Baroque version Elisabeth plays is no less mysterious and wondrous to me.   In my childhood though, I became so familiar with the first verse that I found it quite boring and a bit confusing.  I liked the chorus though, because I got to sing it loud and high.   In high school, our choir director asked us every year to memorize five verses of that hymn for a processional, and every year we failed.  Indeed I felt quite guilty that I could not hold up my end of the assignment.  I don’t recall trying very hard to learn them, but I do recall the dread in my stomach when it became apparent to Mr. Moses that we had failed him again.   Twenty-plus years later I love the story these verses tell--of Israel ens...