Fifteen years ago, in a faraway land, I used to write stories of living and teaching in southwestern Germany. I’d write them here, little anecdotes from the tiny world in which I lived. In the beginning, it was called, quite descriptively, “Kristi Is Teaching in Germany.”

Like anyone raising financial support as a missionary in 2010, starting the blog had been fundraising homework. “Give a little window into how you’re spending your time,” they told us. I did that, I think, and then some. There were stories about myself, my students, what we were reading and doing, how we’d fill our days, our weekends, our evenings. There were pictures and prayer requests, announcements and agendas for the coming weeks and months. A few times a month, I would open a window on my life in Germany, letting in the comforting presence of friends and family from home. Nearly everyone who read what I wrote here already knew me or Black Forest Academy, and were catching up with one or the other through the stories I told. I received messages from friends, family, alumni and parents around the world, and my writing here was even one of the factors that led to meeting my husband. It’s been a gift, truly, to write here these last fifteen years.

My life has changed almost entirely since I was a twenty-five-year-old moving across the Atlantic with a backpack and a violin. I am no longer a missionary, no longer single, no longer living in Germany, and though I’m again a teacher, for many years I wasn’t. I’ve peeled off most of the labels that formed the foundation of this space, but the space has remained, a place to think about community and parenting, living as people of Christ’s hope and grace in a changing, often-troubling world. Coming here to process the changes that these years have wrought on my heart and my life, I’ve found only encouragement and support from the friends who still read here, and for that I’m ever so grateful.

This past year has been filled with transitions for me and our family. My youngest daughter started school just over a year ago. This left me the time and space to consider the next chapter of life, the one in which two kids leave home for a portion of each day, giving me the option of doing so also, if I so desire. I used those quiet hours to earn a Masters of Education in literacy, shoring up the foundation of a calling I’ve been pursuing off and on for the last two decades. And then, this September, I started teaching again, this time seventh grade English and history.

Though this little blog has weathered many changes in my life—changes in family, work and location—I find that now is a good moment to close this window. My first years of teaching fairly demanded to be written about, and this platform (along with the long-abandoned Blogger where I wrote about my first four years teaching in Seattle) offered an important space for processing, finding humor and meaning in the everyday silliness of the classroom.

Still, the way I’ve written about teaching in the past is not, at least for now, how I’ll write about it in the present. Changes in the world of education, increased privacy concerns from parents (including me), and other considerations have made it a different world in which to commit school stories to the permanence of the internet. I will still write—at this point, I’m not sure I know how to avoid it—but I can no longer promise to tell as much about what’s happening inside my classroom.

To that end, I’ve decided to close this particular blog, leaving it as a sweet artifact from a transformative period of my life. I may leave it up here for a while (though I’ll likely let the domain name expire). Though this busy chapter of my life leaves less time for writing than others have, I will continue to post as regularly as I’m able on my Substack, All Manner of Things, to which you can subscribe by email or visit on Substack’s platform. I will continue to write about books and family, bread and typewriters and how I’m seeking faith and community in this season. I’ll be posting whatever poetry I’m able to write, and perhaps even some fiction in the future. Like everything happening in the embodied world beyond my keyboard, it promises to be new and full of growth. Join me, if you’d like, but in any case, thank you for reading all these years.

Love, Kristi

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Below, I’ve pasted my most recent entry on All Manner of Things. If you’ve come this far and still have a moment, it’s a short story about a miraculous lemon tree. (Truly critical reading, I know.) Read it here, or if you like footnotes, follow this link to Substack and find the original.

I’m sure that F. Scott Fitzgerald wasn’t thinking of the commercial potential of Etsy sweatshirts and tote bags when he wrote The Great Gatsby. But all the same, he had Jordan Baker, described as “incurably dishonest,” look at the narrator and say, without much emphasis, “Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.” Which is a weird thing to say right before ending a relationship, which she does, and about a season known for its endings more than its beginnings.

But even if you’ve never read the book, I’d imagine you’ve read the quote—on a mug or a meme or a calligraphed magnet—and perhaps even feel the same about fall. I know I do. Especially this year.

Because in the midst of the whirl of September—redolent of new beginnings and crisp-apple mornings and a towering stack of school forms—a tiny miracle has been unfolding in the well-windowed corner room I’ve been using as an office for the past few years.

I keep several plants in this room, most of them in varied states of thriving. In the spring, I fill muddy little trays with seed starts—daisies, marigolds, basil and all the sunflowers I can manage—and gleefully watch them spear their way through the soil to find the sunlight. There’s one green thing in a red pot whose name I don’t know, a Mother’s Day gift which just sprouted some new leaves. A pothos vine hangs languidly over the edge of the bookshelf, and in the windowsill a sprightly olive tree that we got at Trader Joe’s. And, beside it sits the lemon tree, complacent in her own pot, living her life as the Main Character of this story.

Though I have more hobbies than free time, particularly at the moment, keeping house plants is truly not something I’m passionate about. I learned to tend plants a few years ago because my husband was away for several months, and along with two children, I was hoping to keep alive two dogs, half a dozen fish, and a whole bunch of house plants. I learned to water them on their proper schedules and watched their leaves emerge, one after another, unfurling in green banners that collected the sun and spoke of life and flourishing. Mostly, the plants and I get along, their continued life a silent affirmation that I am decent at providing for the needs of living things.

The lemon tree had a different story altogether. While the other houseplants live rather predictable, orderly lives, popping out leaves at intervals that make sense to them (if not to me), the lemon tree does nothing of the kind. She blooms several times, bursting out blossoms and then losing them immediately, leaving tiny lemonlings behind, which also then mostly fall off. The ones that remain get the chance to become grown-up, professional lemons, which takes about a year.

In that year of lemon-growing, the leaves fall off the tree and then grow back a few times, though never with the courtesy of a proper deciduous tree, nor with their helpful color-coding mood meter. The lemon tree just seems to drop her leaves whenever, and maybe grows them back again when she feels like it, all the while nurturing between one and four tiny lemons on improbably thin branches. And all of that depends on receiving precisely the right amount of sunlight and water, neither too much nor too little.

All of which is a longish way of saying that I pretty much killed the lemon tree this summer.

By July, the lemon tree had no more leaves, and was cradling a single greenish lemon the size of a golf ball in the crook of its two spindly branches. We harvested the fruit, vowing to “do something good” with the lemon that had taken a whole year—and apparently the life force of an entire tree—to create. Then we left the lemon tree alone. To die, I thought to myself, morbidly. It was a salmon spawning in a stream in the fall. It was Charlotte the spider, spinning her last webs and watching her babies float away from her. The lemon tree had given everything she had to this one lemon, and now, I assumed, she was done.

Look, I didn’t take it as a metaphor. No grim foreboding about the costs of creation or generativity, or anything like that. I was sadder than I thought I would be, because I love trees and the fact that I’d had one in my sunny little office had been a source of joy. I felt like I was losing a pet, albeit not much of an interactive one. But at no point did I imagine that this dying lemon tree Meant Something. I rather thought at some point this fall that we’d uproot it and send it to the green bin with the lopped-off daisies and raked-up leaves. End of tree.

Mid-August came, and instead of doing anything with plants, deceased or not, I instead became a teacher. I left the sunny room, and indeed my whole house and my family and my dogs and all the friends I’ve spent the last seven years making, and traveled to another part of the city for most of the day to learn a well-loved vocation all over again. My days ceased to be about packing lunches and picking up kids, and instead were crowded with vowel patterns and affixes, with social-emotional learning and pickup procedures. I’d come home each afternoon, full to the brim with information, some days wilting like an overwatered houseplant and other days revitalized by some new challenge or understanding.

It was September and one of the first days of school when my husband, in an act of faith, repotted the lemon tree, moving her from a larger pot to a smaller in the hope that a right-sized vessel would save her. A sprinkle of fertilizer and a few days later, and we spotted the barest hints of green leaves emerging from one of the dead stumps. These continued to push out, slowly at first and then much faster, until a cluster of leaves adorned the space the lemon had left behind.

A week after that, still more signs of life burst from the tree. A whole new branch sprouted, and then another. Leaves filled the tender stems, their dark veins stark against the waxy green leaves. When the sun shines, it catches the light, turning each leaf into something that glows and dances, ever so alive. I’m not here as often now, but when I am it is the lemon tree I watch, springing to life as the trees outside wrap up their affairs for the winter.

And if you think I can resist the hopeful metaphor, just because I so successfully sidestepped the gloomy one, you’re of course incorrect. Because I need to see it as a thing of promise, this little lemon tree. It’s not about me, or about motherhood, and it’s certainly not about going back to work. To be honest, I’m not sure I’ve experienced enough yet to identify myself with this resurrected lemon tree.

But we’re all living—this week and this month and this year—with something that feels as cut off and lifeless, as hopeless as a bone-dry, potted lemon tree in a windowsill. We’re all aching for signs of life, for the leaves that are waiting to appear. Or perhaps we’re merely ready to rest, calm in the knowledge that this leafless season won’t last forever, waiting, as Rainer Maria Rilke writes, “like the tree that does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of spring without the fear that after them may come no summer. It does come.”

I don’t know what your lemon tree is. I’m not always sure about mine, if I’m honest, though on darker days I can point out plenty that seems beyond repair, wintering to the point I can’t imagine new growth again. Then I look at the lemon tree, beginning again long after I had given up on it.

“Patience is everything!” Rilke wrote, long ago, to a discouraged man not much younger than himself. And today, with a lemon tree glowing green in the window, and an autumn storm brewing outside, I hope to believe it.