Sunday mornings

The Commodores, with lead singer Lionel Richie, infamously coined the phrase in their song with the same title, “easy like Sunday morning.” I don’t know that I’ve always found Sunday mornings to be easy necessarily, but in our current season of life, there is a pace to them that I’ve grown to enjoy. I grew up in the Bible Belt of the South, meaning that Sundays are typically reserved for church and lunch after church.  My family was Catholic, and we went through seasons of regular church attendance and seasons of going mostly on Christmas and Easter, though rarely did we go on a Sunday morning.  Catholic mass is offered on Saturday evenings, and we fell into a pace of going on Saturday nights at 5PM so that we could have a slower Sunday. 

My brother played competitive basketball and baseball, so in the years as he grew older, my family was often traveling for baseball on weekends, and I think those were the seasons where we mostly went to church on Christmas and Easter as we’d often be driving to Myrtle Beach or Kinston on weekends.  When I got to middle school, I befriended Hannah, lovingly known as “Bananz” in my life then and now, and she invited me to her Baptist church.  The Baptist church was quite different from the Catholic church, I quickly realized.  The songs they sang were more modern and fun instead of the songs from the book in the pew at the Catholic church; they had a lot of younger kids that went there instead of mostly older people at the Catholic church who were always telling my mom “they’re getting so big!”  And they had youth group on Wednesday nights, where they did weird things like eat bizarre puréed foods blindfolded as part of a game before diving into praise and worship and a lesson.

I started going to church with Hannah on Sundays and Wednesdays, so Sunday mornings started to look different for me.  I’d still go with my family to church on Saturday nights, and as long as I did that, I was free to also go with Hannah and her family on Sunday mornings. Her parents would pick me up in one of their old fashioned cars; the one I most fondly remember, and forgive me for not being a person who remembers makes or models of cars like my husband does, was an old cream colored station wagon with colored leather interior (I remember it being red, but I may be getting this confused with her dad’s Mustang that he later purchased that was cream with red leather interior) that I would sit in the back of on the way to church with Hannah and sometimes her older sister, Melanie.

Some Sundays of my childhood were spent going to the beach before “the stampedes” arrived in the warmer months of the year. I loved Sunday mornings at the beach; we’d stop at Ken’s Bagels on Wrightsville Avenue and pick up to-go bagels packed in brown paper bags that we’d carry with us to the beach to eat once we had our car unloaded and towels laid out on the hot sand.  We would have a bag of quarters that we’d pay our parking with (I think you’d need way too many quarters now to pay in quarters), and then we’d head off with our boogie boards and beach chairs to set up on the beach. Wrightsville Beach was our favorite childhood beach to go to, and if you ask me, I still think it’s the prettiest of the Wilmington area beaches, but it’s so hard to get to now and has become so expensive for parking.  When Scott and I go now, it’s usually in the off season, and we usually go down to the jetty where he proposed over a decade ago to walk around with our sweatshirts and winter gear while the wind whips through my hair. I think the last I checked, it costs something like $7 an hour to park at Wrightsville in the on-season.

But as a kid, I loved Sunday mornings at the beach.  I’d sink my teeth into my plain bagel slathered with plain cream cheese and let the sun hit my face as I looked out into the turquoise waters of the Atlantic. Wrightsville Beach is known for having white sand, which is why I think it’s the prettiest of the area beaches.  It also frequently has turquoise waters whereas some of the other beaches like Carolina and Kure Beach had more of a brownish color due to their proximity to the Cape Fear River. 

I wasn’t one who wanted to get in those waters, make no mistake.  I had an incredible fear of jellyfish (nope, not sharks, you read that right— jellyfish) as a child and rarely went into the water once this fear developed; before I knew about jellyfish, I would take my purple and lime green boogie board into the water and clumsily attempt to “catch waves.” The waves seemed elusive to me, I don’t know that I ever was very good at boogie boarding.  It wasn’t until I tried my hand at surfing that my fear of jellyfish came to be; I think I was around 10 when that happened.  I didn’t do official surf lessons, though many of my friends did. Instead, I borrowed a surf board from a friend and practiced a little on the beach with popping up like I’d seen in movies before heading into the water.  

It must have been July or August when I finally went into the water with a surfboard for the first time, because I swear that I was paddling out into a wave when I saw no fewer than eight to ten jellyfish as the wave rose.  In the earlier months of the year, the ocean was cooler and not the right environment for jellyfish to come in closer to the shore; but once July hit, you could guarantee that jellyfish would be floating around closer to the shoreline.  I had heard many a story of jellyfish stings and later, when we had a really warm water year, Portuguese man o’war sitting offshore with their 150 foot long tentacles that could wrap around you while their bodies lay hundreds of feet from you. So I’d dip my toes in the water or carefully place my beach chair along the shore where just my feet dipped in so I could read a book and enjoy the water without fulling immersing myself into the dangerous waters. Somehow I escaped ever being stung by a jellyfish while living in a beach town, and I think it’s due to my extreme caution over ever entering the waters.

Sunday mornings have looked so differently over the years as an adult.  In later high school and college, I attended church with friends at the Summit Church on Sunday mornings and then would head back to my dorm to do homework and studying for the week.  As a young adult freshly out of school, I often worked night shift on weekends and would be too tired to do anything but sleep on Sundays.  In Indiana once we were married, I also worked night shift for a while and had a hard time staying awake for church on Sundays. Once I switched to days, it was a little easier as long as it wasn’t my assigned weekend to work, and Scott and I would drive the thirty minutes to College Park to attend church together and then get brunch or lunch with friends after before he had to settle in for a busy dental school study schedule in the afternoon. Some Sundays, we’d wake up early and make lemon blueberry pancakes before church, always reminding me of the song Banana Pancakes by Jack Johnson. 

We’ve never really had many Sunday mornings that sound much like Lionel Richie’s version, or even Maroon 5’s version where it’s Sunday morning and rain is falling while lying in bed with someone you love.  We are on the precipice of a new season of Sunday mornings that probably will look nothing like anything we’ve ever experienced, where I know getting out the door to church will take Herculean effort, and I’ll be rushing out the door with a baby in one hand, diaper bag slung over my shoulder, and Bible tucked under my arm while Scott waits in the driveway with the car running.

But for right now, we still have our season of Sunday morning rhythms that we’ve fallen into over the past few months, and I simply adore them.  I wake up before Scott or the dogs are awake and sneak through the nursery into the main part of the house where I wake the dogs by opening the creaky door in our old home that closes off our bedrooms from the rest of the house.  Doc is always excited to see me and either brings me a toy or a bone while furiously wagging his tail, and Ruby starts jumping around her crate, crying excitedly to be released from it.  After letting them out, I sometimes feed them or sometimes make them wait a bit (when we immediately feed them after awakening, they fall into a pattern of crying to wake us up for food, so we try our best to give a little space before feedings so that they can wake up when we do).  And then I head to the kitchen to take the dough out that we made the night before. I’m not unique in having taken on sourdough baking as a millennial woman, though I did arrive a little late to the game for this one.

Everyone I know seems to have taken up sourdough baking during the pandemic; I didn’t have the patience or capacity for it at that time.  We were doing a total home renovation that we ended up expediting to complete so that we could move back to North Carolina in the midst of 2020; Scott and I were both working in healthcare and were exhausted by the constantly changing guidelines with COVID and trying to manage patients in the midst of that.  The last thing I wanted to do was take care of another living thing like a sourdough starter.  But when our friends Ingrid and Dylan took up sourdough baking in North Carolina, they gifted us some of their starter that dated back to sometime in the 1800s.  Dylan gave me the starter in a mason jar along with careful instructions on how to feed it, and then he texted me his favorite sourdough recipe.  I had endless questions and anxiety about this starter.

I don’t know when or where I developed such a scarcity mindset in my short life, but I definitely have one, and it showed up in my sourdough tending early on.  I was terrified of killing my starter, so instead of throwing away sourdough discard or making a sourdough discard recipe with it, I kept multiplying my starters until I had four of them.  I thought “well, if one dies, at least I’ll have more.” It was a chore to keep up with four, and I became quickly burnt out with it.  During the historic tropical storm Helene that hit Asheville, my starters fell to the wayside and became the least important thing to care for, especially once I found out I was also pregnant for the sixth time and needed to tend to more important living things than my starters.  

We left for Tennessee to get labs done for my early pregnancy due to our history of recurrent losses, to gather supplies for Scott’s coworkers who were having trouble accessing basic food and gas supplies, and to bring Ruby to training in Kentucky which we were paying for even though we couldn’t get her there easily. When we left, our power had been off for a few days and we were storing my starters in the freezer thinking it was the coolest place to keep them even though the power was off.  While we were gone in TN, the power came back on and my starters froze.  They were never quite the same after that, and I kept them in the fridge with the thought that I’d just have to throw them all away.  I decided to feed them all once last time to see if anything at all would happen before discarding them and either starting over or giving up on my sourdough journey. I was stunned when one of them started bubbling up and almost outgrowing its container, while the other three sat limp in their jars with no signs of active cultures within their jars.  I discarded those three, but the one that was active, named Hank, I actually split and named his offspring Helene.  This starter, like our unlikely sixth pregnancy, was apparently going to be a survivor.  

So with two sourdough starters that are now healthier than my starters have ever been, I spend the early hours of Sunday morning before church kneading dough with my hands and placing lids on Dutch ovens while I wait for the second rise so I can place them in the oven.  Once they’re in the oven, I read my Bible and pray, sipping on hot coffee while I wait the thirty minutes for the loaves to bake with the lid on, and upon removing the lids for the second half hour of baking, I head into the bedroom to get ready for church.  Sometimes, if I have time, I read a newsletter in my inbox from Annie B. Jones, titled Sunday Porch Visits, where she publishes an essay from her metaphorical front porch. 

Our church is 35 minutes from our house currently, though they’re building a satellite campus only 5 minutes from our home, and we feel that the changing of seasons in our lives with a baby coming is perfect for having a church closer to home and hopefully community in our own neighborhood.  We’ve loved and cherished our friends in our small group that we’ve been part of for almost four years now, and we plan to maintain these friendships even when we switch to a more local group, but I can’t tell you how excited I am to also have community and friends who live less than a thirty minute drive from us.  Adult friendships are so hard to develop and cultivate, so hard to maintain in the midst of busy schedules once you do develop them, and so I know we’ll want to keep the friends we have while also making space for some that live a little closer to home for us.  

What a winding, rambling road we’ve taken for me to write about Sunday mornings;  I’m a huge empath and sentimentalist, so I think as we prepare to enter a new seasons, I’m trying to savor the few Sunday mornings we have left with our current pace of life.  To think of caring for a whole human on top of a pair of sourdough starters and dogs on Sunday mornings feels incomprehensible to me, but I know we’ll adjust and find our new rhythm.  We have potentially five more Sunday mornings to enjoy at this pace, and I think I’ll cherish the memories of our Sunday mornings before we had children even as I try to settle into the new rhythm of Sunday mornings with littles.  Friends tell me that they’re a little more harried with dressing kids in Sunday morning church clothes and ushering them out the door, so I’m sure we’ll be grateful for the margin afforded to us in only having a short drive in that season of life. 

But for now, I think we’ll take our Sunday mornings as they are, with my hot coffee beside me, a Bible open to the pages of Isaiah, sourdough baking in the oven, and well-fed dogs snoozing on the Chancey couch in the living room.  My husband still sleeps while I prepare to go wake him to start preparing for church this morning, and I think I’ll miss these days in our next season, but I think I’ll also love the opportunity to step into the season we’ve only ever dreamed about.  And I think that the new rhythms of Sunday mornings will be just as lovely but in a wholly new way that we can’t even begin to fathom.