and woke us up.

For many, many months, as best I recall, we've had a mystery across the street. Not much happens in our sleepy village, at least nothing exciting since the police department updated to Dodge Chargers last spring. Then began the mysterious clearing of brush from a field across the street. Large trucks and yellow bucket equipment meticulously picked up every last limb (and oh, how many there were after two large ice storms) and burned them. Every weekend brought another large fire and on windy days my Jason and I would worry a spark might fly to our apartment and burn the whole place down. Finally all was burned and out came police officers (yes, yes, in their Dodge Chargers even though the field is in spitting range of the station) to plot out lines in the field. And then came a giant pole with an angry brightbrightbright light that shines directly into our bedroom and, magically, through our miniblinds and opaque brown curtain. It is the sort of light for which eyelids are no match. It is the sort of the light that makes my husband cuss. And then came trucks with gravel and they made a nice square of rocks no where near the size of the now clear field. And Jason and I would sit and ponder what they could be doing.

And then, one morning before our six o'clock alarm went off, we both jerked awake to a PING, PING, PING that sounded not unlike that evil light had come to life and was using an anvil to drive metal stakes into our brains. This, before six in the morning. We were displeased. We disparaged the name of the evil groundsman who putzes around the police station at odd hours, the very man who drove a miniature snowplow--quite deliberately, it looked--over our mailbox. We knew it was him.

When we were outside to leave for work the source of the cacophony was clear. Two new shiny signs with arrows pointed the way to the gravel square: ADDITIONAL PARKING. Forevermore. All that so that people will not park on the street the one night a month the village holds court for all the speed offenders.

In other news, my mom discovered the Wii. I haven't even played with one. She is now campaigning for my dad to get her one. They are 68 and 65. An old 68 and 65. This is the weirdest thing ever.

If I could, I would read the Bible for the first time. [of course, I could always read the entire thing for the first time--I haven't exhausted that opportunity yet.] I want to know what Jesus would look like if it were the first time I'd ever encountered him in the Gospels. But I feel about the Bible the way too many old couples feel about each other--I've been there too many times to feel much mystique. Funny though, I want the people I love to love this book I wish I loved. I've bought several for others over the years. I get a kick out picking a translation and even a pretty cover I think they'll appreciate. One of my Sunday School boys, eleven-year-old Ruben, lit up when I gave him a brown and beige [very manly looking, I might add] faux suede New Living Translation. And my co-worker Heidi was tickled to death when I remembered her random comment about not reading the Bible because "the King James just doesn't make any sense" and brought her a teal-flowered, brown-leather-bow bedecked NLT women's study Bible. While she was an off-and-on church goer, she's never really been into the nitty-gritty side of Jesus, the flip side we Christians piously pride ourselves on being right with. She thanked me and mentioned what she'd read a few times after that, but not much.

Then today, out of nowhere, she said she thought of me last night when she was lounging in her living room, saw her Bible laying on the mantle, and decided to read some more in John. (All right, she calls it Johns. And I don't have the heart to say anything about it. I mean, it is John's Gospel....maybe that's what she means....) And even though she's heard things out of that book before, it sounded like she really read if for herself for the first time last night. She said, "I got partway through the book and all I could think was 'That poor guy. The whole book is miracle after miracle. Everybody kept begging him for more tricks and most of them didn't really care if they got proof. They were just going to kill him later anyway, and the more tricks he gave them, the more reasons they had to come after him. Poor guy.'" And we got into this discussion where I saw him a little differently. I told her what amazes me--and what I find so utterly un-human--is that he loved them anyway. Heidi knows my flaws, she hears me gripe about patients who give us crap, she sees me lose my temper when a patient has pushed all my buttons, and she knows I don't have that kind of super-human love. I told her he wouldn't act like we do. I didn't tell her this, but I can't help thinking it: People often reject us because we're flawed yet we find it hard to love them even when we know darn well they have reason to reject us. But he was rejected knowing darn well he knew best for those people and his love was strong enough for that.

That's some kind of love. I was glad she spoke up and let me see him from her first-time eyes for just a minute.