Smiling from ear to ear, wearing her handmade “wedding dress.”
She is three years old.
She came into our lives like a little angel of light in dark times descending.
My oldest son, like the prodigal, had returned home to find new direction for his life. He enrolled in seminary but resisted the call to preach. He met a young woman seeking the Lord’s guidance in rebuilding her own life…and her little girl’s.
Said my son to me, one starkly memorable morning: “I have been seeing someone.”
“Wonderful!” I replied. Noting his expression: “She must be special.”
“She is. I have something to tell you…”
Long pause. Entire lifetimes hang in the balance of such.
I braced myself.
“She has a little girl.”
I breathed. Didn’t even know I was holding my breath.
Things happen in everybody’s life. The whole of our stories is the overcoming.
I asked only one question: “Is this what you want?”
He nodded. A moment too great for words.
Finally he managed: “You always wanted a little girl.”
Lifelong desire of my heart, now granted.
In the ensuing months we nearly lost his father. My husband battled his way back from heart attacks, cardiac arrests, surgeries. A gray day-to-day existence, clinging to the Lord and the wisdom of the medical team…to this day, medical professionals read his reports and look at him with awe, the unspoken message in their eyes: How are you still here?
My husband survived to officiate our son’s wedding, for which the little “wedding dress” was made. Our girl stood by her Mama and new stepfather during the ceremony. Our boy made vows to them both: to be a loving husband and father, forever.
He also became a pastor. Like his dad.
The COVID pandemic came and went. A new little granddaughter was born. My husband suffered additional health setbacks. Every time he overcame to continue his life and his ministry. When despair threatened me, I wrote my way through it. When I was too weary to pray, I rested in the knowledge that the Spirit prayed on my behalf. When I felt alone, too weighted to move, and that I could go no further, a voiceless voice stirred my heart: You have little girls. You affect their now and their future.
It always, always pulled me through.
I think a lot about loss. How we humans fear it more than anything. How it feels like the end of the story.
It is not.
It is out of loss, out of human frailty and failings, that God does his mightiest work…we will not know all the answers in this life, but he is a seekable and findable God, if we are earnest. He is present with us; we must trust. At any given time we can see only the littlest fraction of his great picture, unless he allows us to see a bit more…
Back to my barefoot girl.
More than anything, we fear losing those we love. From the start she wrapped herself in and around my son’s heart…he so wanted to adopt her. He belonged to her and she to him, but not legally.
Until recently.
This summer our family celebrated the official adoption of our beautiful barefoot girl, now growing tall. On that day at the courthouse, she was a radiant as she was when she was three and so excited about the wedding.
I could quote Scriptures about being adopted children of God, about love triumphing over all and never ending, about the Lord telling his prophets to stand barefoot on holy ground. The verses swirl together in my mind.
What I know is that faith and love are holy ground, exemplified in face of my precious barefoot girl. The spiritual journey is lived moment by moment, knowing the sovereign Lord can bring—so often brings— holiness out of unholiness. Wholeness out of brokenness. That is the whole message of Christ and salvation; it is something we cannot do for ourselves. He is the God of redemption and restoration beyond our greatest imaginings.
My heart has learned to sing with the psalmist: Wait on the Lord; be of good courage, and He shall strengthen your heart; Wait, I say, on the Lord!
He will deliver.
So gloriously.
Ready for the wedding day
Adoption day, at last
*******
with special thanks to my fellow Spiritual Journey band of writers, and to Linda Mitchell for choosing the theme of “barefoot.” Linda: I’d been wanting to commemorate my granddaughter’s adoption. “Barefoot” gave me the perfect beginning place.
Today I dug deep in the trunk and pulled out the album.
The cover is age-blemished. Pages yellowing. The cards are fragile, antiquated. The inked signatures, along with the love and best wishes, are fading.
On this day, forty years ago, my dress was ready and hanging on the closet door. My mother paid $130 for it and repaired the uneven hem. We’d found a cathedral bridal cap on the clearance rack, the price reduced because the pearl beading was coming off—she bought that, too, and restitched the tiny beads.
When Grandma offered to pay for the wedding cake, my mother wept.
My mother-in-law had new carpet installed in her home just prior to hosting the rehearsal dinner. She made spaghetti. A widow of eleven years, she’d given her engagement ring to her boy, to give to me. She cried on the morning of our wedding because it was raining, but the sun broke through the clouds in all its summer glory before the ceremony. The following spring, she would remarry.
My father asked a coworker, an amateur photographer, to take pictures. Our next-door neighbor, whose three kids my mother babysat for years, hosted my shower and provided the refreshments for the reception.
My grandmother asked her sister to stay with my grandfather, who was ailing and not up to traveling three hours in a car (cancer would make itself known and his bladder would be removed; he would live another fourteen years). Grandma was determined to be there. One of my most treasured photos from that day is of her seated on a pew alongside my Grannie and my mother, all of them smiling, wearing matching white carnation corsages.
My mother made the four ocean-blue bridesmaid’s dresses; my sister and new sister-in-law were radiant in them. Mom also made my sky blue going-away outfit and, at the last minute, removed her white beads and put them around my neck. The final photos in my wedding album are of her in her handmade pink dress, minus the beads, watching me leave, and my father standing in his black tails and striped ascot, grinning from ear to ear, a big cigar clenched in his teeth (congrats, Daddy; your eldest is safely handed off, not your responsibility anymore).
I was twenty years old.
I loved them all. I knew they loved me.
My family.
Forty years later, I remember them, despite the unraveling. The irreparable rifts. Death, loss, mental illness, addiction, estrangement, falling away… the story is surreal. Nightmarish. Like something from Picasso’s blue period with Van Gogh’s cypresses lurking in the foreground.
But on that bright day, we were together, celebrating. I read every faded, fragile card and my own handwritten record of the events. So much hope and joy, all there, preserved. For a few moments I linger in the vibrance, the whole wide circle of family love, everything that culminated in this new beginning. I remember my mother’s sacrifices especially.
And so the prologue ended. There are pangs, yes. Shatterings and shards in the heart. But the love is there. Still there. Despite all.
I poured my life into chapters that wrote themselves across the four subsequent decades, into the husband, the ministry, the children and now grandchildren, that God has granted me. As my husband said in the CICU to our oldest son, after regaining conscious from induced hypothermia, recovering from his first heart attack, cardiac arrest, and surgery: I have poured everything I have into you.
Duty. Sacrifice. For better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, until death do us part.
And so I made my vow, not only to a once-young man but to God, who loves with a steadfast love, from everlasting to everlasting.
Today my dress is ready and hanging on the closet door. Ivory with lace sleeves. Not new, but it’ll work. Tomorrow our family—our sons, daughters-in-law, granddaughters—will gather to celebrate this milestone with us.
I shall tell them, as best I can, that they’re infinitely more than what I dreamed of when I first set my satin-slippered foot on this path, forty years ago. Gifts beyond compare. Love multiplied, exponentially.
Straight from the hand of my Lord, who makes all things new.
I close my album.
with special thanks to the insightful band of Spiritual Journey writers and to this month’s host, Leigh Anne Eck, who chose the topic of “family.”
I was five when my dad bought the house where I grew up.
There were good things about the house. A Big Bathroom and a Little Bathroom. Having two seemed luxurious to me, a child accustomed to apartments. Cloud-like swirls on the ceiling that my mother said were made by twisting a broom in the plaster while it was wet. A huge picture window in the living room, through which I could see a very tall tree behind the neighbors’ house. To me, the tiptop of the trunk appeared to be a lady sitting and gazing across the earth like some kind of woodland princess. Day in and day out, she sat there atop of her tall tree-throne, a regal silhouette, never moving.
There were things I didn’t like about the house. The red switch plate on the utility room wall that my father said to never ever touch. I believed that if anyone touched this switch, the furnace would explode and blow us all to smithereens. Even after I outgrew my terror, I steered well clear of that red plate. I didn’t like the thick gray accordion doors on the bedroom and hall closets. Bulky, cumbersome, and stiff, they didn’t really fold. They came off their tracks easily. These hateful doors eventually disappeared; one by one, they were discarded. Our closets were just open places.
The linen closet stood directly across from my bedroom door in the narrow hall leading to the Big Bathroom.
It wasn’t a true closet, just a recessed place with wooden shelves. I don’t remember an accordion door ever being there.
What I do remember is that one of those linen closet shelves had a terrible gash along its edge.
It looked like a raw wound that might start oozing at any moment. A gaping slit. When I pored over pictures of how to do an appendectomy in my parents’ set of medical encyclopedias (and why did we have these—? An exceptionally persuasive door-to-door salesman—?) the pulled-back human flesh and tissue made me think of the wound in the linen closet shelf.
This shiny-pink raw place bothered me. It was ugly. Almost…embarrassing. Something that shouldn’t be seen, shouldn’t be exposed…why had the builders done this? Couldn’t they have turned the shelf around so the wound wouldn’t show? It was an affront to me as a child, before I knew what taking affront meant.
I know now that the flaw is a bark-encased scar. The shelf came from a tree (maple?) that was injured, somehow. Maybe by a cut or fire. An online search produces this AI-generated explanation:
The tree’s cambium layer, which is responsible for producing new bark and wood, starts to grow new cells around the wound, forming a protective layer of tissue called callus.
As the tree continues to grow, the callus tissue can expand and eventually cover the original wound, creating a scar that is encased within the new bark.
In short: The scar is evidence that the tree worked to prevent inner decay and heal itself after being wounded, and that it went on living for a good while before it ended up as the shelf holding our towels and washcloths beside the Big Bathroom.
I never touched that raw-looking wound in the wood. I averted my eyes from it, even hated it for existing.
Now, when I return in my mind to the rooms and halls of my childhood home, they are always empty, and that old scar in the shelf is the thing I want most to see.
How strange.
Maybe I am drawn to it out of kinship. I do not know the story of the tree’s life, only that this remnant is testimony to its suffering and ability to overcome. I could liken the scar to the ways adults damage children, having been damaged as children. I could see it as a symbol for my mother, whose early wounds festered long, the extent of which would eventually be revealed in addiction.
That’s the real red switch, for it blew us all apart.
Maybe I just want to place my fingers on the old raw place at last, tenderly, in benediction. I would say that I understand now about layers of callus tissue expanding, covering, and absorbing the deepest of cuts over a long, long time…it is always there, but it hurts no more, and I am no longer ashamed to see it or to let it be seen.
My boy walked me down the aisle and seated me at the second pew, in the same spot where I sit each Sunday while his father preaches. In the same spot where I sat while I was expecting him and felt him stop moving whenever the piano was played, where I knew he was listening to the music before he was ever born. In the same spot where I sat with him in my arms for the first time during worship, when he was four days old.
I rested in the remembering.
I rested in the preparations being complete, and the long-awaited moment at hand.
I rested in the expression on my boy’s face, making his vows to his bride. I have never seen a groom with so tender a countenance. I marveled, and rested.
I rested, and rejoiced, that his father lived to officiate after suffering such serious health setbacks in recent years.
His father began to cry during the ceremony.
I rested in that love. In the overcoming. In the triumph.
I rested in the presence of my husband’s sister, that she traveled to be here, that she reminded my boy of his grandmother who loved him so. Ma-Ma is here, you know, she told my boy just before the wedding. She cried, too, over how much he looks like her mother.
I rested in the knowledge that my sister-in-law remembers her mother every time she sees a cardinal, her mother’s favorite bird. A symbolic bird, representing Christ. I remembered that my sister-in-law and my boy were holding Ma-Ma’s hands when she died. I rested in the serendipity of my boy’s bride choosing her wedding gown before she knew it was named “The Cardinal.” It happens to be her own grandmother’s favorite bird.
I rested in the significance of my boy’s precious bride wearing her grandmother’s pearls and my earrings, the third bride in the family to do so, after my first daughter-in-law and my youngest niece, who came with her new baby to see her cousin married. I recalled buying those earring for my twenty-fifth wedding anniversary.
I rested in that.
I rested in the timing, in late September marking the births of my grandfather and my husband as well as the loss of my father, and that it now marks new joy.
I rested in the day, in the glorious cusp-of-autumn sunshine, in this season of scuppernongs and piercing calls of red-shouldered hawks. I rested in the symbolism of wildflowers that my new daughter-in-law loves so well; although delicate and fragile, they are incredibly adaptable and resilient. They represent delight of the soul. She carried wildflowers; they were the pattern of my boy’s tie. Her dress and their wedding rings also bear vines—a symbol of deep spiritual significance.
I rested in the Scripture my husband read, from the second chapter of the Song of Solomon, the first time he’s ever used it in a wedding:
My beloved spake, and said unto me, Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away. For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone. The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land; The fig tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines with the tender grape give a good smell. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.
I rest in the fact that my boy and his bride reside just four minutes away from me.
And I rest in the vows that they wrote and spoke to each other, and in the invisible thread that pulled them together, drawn by the hand of God.
Yes.
I rest in the litany of it all.
My boy and me in front of the church after the ceremony. Behind us is the parsonage where we lived when he was born.
Photos by Kailey B. Photograhy
*******
with thanks to Two Writing Teachers for the wonderful sharing-place known as the Tuesday Slice of Life Story Challenge
Easter morning. I am six. My little sister is four. We’ve torn apart our Easter baskets. The green plastic grass is strewn all over and we’ve eaten the heads off our hollow chocolate bunnies. We didn’t go to church because Mama isn’t feeling well. She has trouble with her back and sits in traction for a while every day, in a chair by the bedroom with her chin in a sling that hangs from the top of the door. I am in the kitchen when the phone rings and she comes to answer it.
Oh no, she says. Oh, no. She starts to cry. Tears stream down her cheeks.
Listening to her side of the conversation with her friend from church, I learn that our pastor died this morning. At church. Standing at the pulpit to give his sermon when he sank to the floor. People thought at first he was kneeling to pray, strange for a Baptist, but…it is Easter…
In the days to come, the church people will comfort each another by saying this is exactly how he’d have wanted to go.
*******
Easter morning. I am eighteen. I’m not in church. I quit going a few years ago. I have been cutting my college classes more and more to run with my colorful theater crowd. I’ve decided to make my living perfoming on stage. It’s all I care about. My aunt, Mama’s sister who never married nor had children, says I’m “caught between the moon and New York City.” Deep down I know this is not the best that I can do: I don’t want to be at home anymore, I’m not getting along with my father, my grandmother is worried about me. I know she prays, because…
I have lost my way.
*******
Easter morning. I am nineteen. I am not in church, but I’m looking at a card that arrived at the end of the week. A beautiful Easter card from Miss Margaret. I didn’t know she had my address. I met her during my recent hospital stay, when I ran a high fever with a virus and needed an IV. Miss Margaret was my roommate. A large Black lady with a beautiful smile and a voice as warm as as a blanket. She was in for a mastectomy. She’d asked me, just before I left and before she went for surgery: Do you go to church?
No, ma’am, not like I should…(I didn’t say not at all).
Hmm, she replied. That young man who’s come to see you. Brought you those flowers. Have you been going out with him for long?
No, ma’am. I haven’t been out with him at all yet, actually. I got sick on the day of our first date and ended up here instead…it was also opening night of the play we were both inand I missed that, too.
What I didn’t tell Miss Margaret is that I was afraid the guy would give up on me…but he hadn’t, yet.
She nodded. Listen to me, Child. You are young. Watch out for yourself, hear? He seems a nice young man. You ought to get yourself back to church.
So here I am on Easter morning, not in church, looking at this card she mailed me… an Easter prayer signed Love and Blessings Always from Miss Margaret, P.S. I’m doing fine.
II wonder: Is it too late to get to church today?
I call my boyfriend.
*******
Easter morning. I am twenty-one. I’ve come back to my childhood church with my husband…the guy who didn’t give up on me when I got sick and missed our first date as well as opening night of the community theater production we were both performing in…a play entitled “Whose Life Is It Anyway?” We’ve been married for a year and a half, we’re both working, we just left our one-bedroom apartment for a new townhouse, first time homeowners. Up until these last months, we thought we would move to New York and pursue acting careers. I’ve been accepted to The American Academy of Dramatic Arts and they have allowed me a grace period to come….if we can figure out how we are going to afford to live there.
But my husband has recently told me: Honey…we need to talk.
And then he just says it: I know God’s calling me to preach.
His beautiful face is so earnest. I tell him the only thing I know to say: If He’s really calling you, then you have to try.
The huge sanctuary is packed today. Hundreds of people. The pastor has been here for fifteen years, the successor of the one who died here on that long-ago Easter morning. Today he preaches from Acts 17, Paul addressing the Areopagus on the resurrection of Christ; Paul is mocked, but one man and one woman are called out here in the passage by name for joining him in belief: Dionysious and Damaris.
When the pastor offers the invitation, I grab my husband’s hand: We are rededicating our lives today.
We walk the aisle. In all that crowd, we are the only ones who do: One man, one woman.
I tell my pastor that my husband is called to preach.
He will take him under his wing, the fifty-third and final young man he ordains to the ministry.
He will tell us later: It won’t be easy; I had to step into the pulpit of a man who died there. But the Lord will provide. He always comes through…sometimes at last minute when you are thinking all is lost, but He always comes through.
Then he’ll look at me: You were in my teen Bible School class, I recall. It’s been a while. I remember you coming to church with your mother when you were a child. Your dad didn’t attend and your mother didn’t drive.
Yes, sir. That’s right. My dad works most Sundays. Mama didn’t drive. She’s just recently gotten her license.
He will nod: You walked to church until we got our bus ministry started. Your mother was the first person to sign up for it.
I didn’t know that.
*******
Easter morning. I am twenty-five. Life is a blur with a baby boy to care for. I meant to change the old wreath hanging on the front of the parsonage, over by the wide porch swing. When the weather is warmer I will sit here and sing to him, but right now it’s still a little chilly, with the beach breezes blowing up from the bay. Before we go to church, I will put up the Easter wreath. Better late than never.
When I reach for the tattered old wreath, a bird flies out, startling me. There’s a nest in it, with babies cheeping… I had no idea.
Awed by the discovery of brand-new life on this particular morning, I let it be.
I save the new Easter wreath for next year.
*****
Easter afternoon. I am thirty. My family is gathered at the Baptist church in Daddy’s hometown for the funeral of his sister, my aunt. She was fifty-four, spent the last years of her short life in a nursing home, bedridden with mutliple sclerosis. For all of these years my grandmother drove a sixty-mile round trip each week to visit, taking her daughter’s soiled laundry home and returning it fresh and clean, and trimming her nails because the nursing staff said they weren’t allowed to.
Beside her in the pew, Daddy is pale. He’s recovering from a heart attack and four bypasses.
When my husband and I followed the limo to the church, I could see Daddy and Grandaddy in the back of it, side by side…two silver heads, exactly alike.
Grandma is broken but her faith is not. She says, I’m truly glad she isn’t suffering any more but oh, it hurts. It hurts.
She died on Good Friday, Grandma, I tell her. Like Jesus.
Grandma looks at me a long moment, her watery blue eyes gleaming: I can’t belive I haven’t thought of that.
The service begins. On Grandma’s other side, Granddaddy bows his head. Tears are trickling down his cheeks.
This is the only time I’ve ever seen him cry.
*******
Easter morning. I am thirty-seven. My husband and our boys have only been in our new house for a month and I’m still scrambling to get organized. I love the house, not that I wasn’t grateful for parsonages having been provided all these years, it’s just that eventually we will retire and you can’t do that in a parsonage. Plus…I can’t say exactly why, but this place somehow reminds me of my grandparents’ home. The great irony being that they’ll never see it. None of my childhood family will. Granddaddy’s been gone four years. Grandma’s in the nursing home; she’ll never travel again. Daddy died suddenly seven months ago and I’m still trying to process it, especially since everything fell apart with my mother afterward and there will be no repairing the ripping apart of our family…I think about how she took me and my sister to church…how she was the first person to sign up for the bus ministry…I have to remember the good, I must choose to remember the good, for it was there and real and even though a personmay be destructive with those wheels already in motion long before she brings you onto the planet, there were always good things.
I cannot dwell on this anymore, I have two children of my own to get ready for church now and Easter is our biggest day…it really won’t do for the preacher’s wife to be late. Again.
*****
Easter morning. Today. Let’s just say my fifties will soon be coming to a close. Depending on when you read this, I will either be headed to church or having returned home. My husband is still preaching. Our oldest is in his fifth year of pastoring a church nearby, close enough that our two granddaughters come over often, including these past couple of days, to play with their Franna. Our daughter-in-law is an extraordinary pastor’s wife and mother as well as an incredible artist. So many gifts. Our youngest is playing piano for today’s worship service and he’ll sing the solo for the choir on “Rise Again” in his beautiful, beautiful voice… his fiancee is deeply compassionate, loving, always smiling. They are happy. Yesterday I wrote of digging the past and mining your memories for the stories that matter…today I write, my heart overflowing with abundance of life, for now, now, now. Today I write of the peace that passes understanding, for with God, the story does not end. The message of Easter that echoes through the ages is not one of death, but of life; not of lost causes, but of new purpose; not of despair, but of overcoming…it is a message of redemption, sacrificial love, forgiving, being set free. I think of those words, rise again, as I drive out of my neighborhood to see a hawk take flight, the morning sun flashing on its white belly, and discovering, that same day, the house finches have, indeed, built a new nest in the front door wreath, despite last year’s tragedy of all five babies dying suddenly. The mother began laying eggs during Holy Week.
Five of them.
The father sang a beautiful song after each egg was laid.
A song of new life, hope, and joy.
I know it so, so well.
The echoes of Easter.
*******
Composed for the 31st and last day of the Slice of Life Story Challenge with Two Writing Teachers
—thank you all for being such a loving, supportive community; please keep writing ❤
I grew up in the city, a child of sidewalks, stoplights, bridges, and clattering trains. I could walk to church, to the 7-Eleven for Slurpees or candy, to Woolco buy the latest hit song on a 45 RPM record, and to all three public schools I attended from kindergarten through twelfth grade.
The memories of nature from my neighborhood, other than the maple tree which dropped its leaves in the front yard every fall, are the gray roly-polies I played with on the concrete steps at the back door, the slugs I salted to watch them dissolve (sorry, slugs), ants, and eastern tent caterpillars with their beautiful rainbow patterning. I caught them put and them into recycled butter tubs with lids, to be disappointed when they turned into such plain moths. Oh, and the random mouse that got in the house to startle my mother, who screamed. And the ditch rat that got into my bedroom… another story for another day, that.
I know there were birds. There had to be birds.
I can’t remember them.
I longed to live in the country, with my grandparents. Even though the mosquitoes, yellow flies, and ticks might eat me alive, I could find tiny gray toads the size of my thumbnail. I would marvel at the dazzling colors of dragonflies, once I got over my terror of them. Hummingbirds zoomed past me for my grandmother’s flowers, never minding my presence, their emerald and ruby feathers gleaming like jewel-fire. Cicadas rattled the earth and my heart with their rhythms. There were deer, rabbits, snakes (alas!), and birds, always birds, chattering and singing incessantly in the dense woods…
The longing never left me, so when my husband and I settled in the countryside, I knew I was home. I rejoiced that our boys would grow up treasuring a closeness to nature…
So I thought.
The oldest always wanted to live in the city (is this always the way? Wishing for the exact opposite of what we have?).
He grew up. He went to the city.
He was miserable.
He came back…got married, became a father…
He texted me a photo recently, with tremendous excitement: Look what I just saw!
A barren field along a deserted country road…
Where stood two bald eagles.
His eyes sparkled when he saw me later: They were huge! So beautiful…
It is better than I ever dreamed, this life, here in the country.
Isn’t it, Son.
*******
Composed for Day 22 of the Slice of Life Story Challenge with Two Writing Teachers
On Day Two of July’s Open Write at Ethical ELA, host Mo Daly invites us to write a poem in Fibonacci sequence: six lines with syllables of 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8.
The Fibonacci sequence appears over and over in nature, from shells to flowers to trees to our own DNA.
Maybe that’s what led to thisdouble-reverse attempt…
Hey, Ancestors
composed after a trip to the home place
Come sit a spell on the porch. I want to know you. Tell me the stories of your life. I don’t mind your being a ghost. Just (if you please) try not to rock your chair too much.
And so it comes to pass, at long last, that I return to the site of my sun-kissed childhood summers.
My ancestral homeplace in eastern North Carolina. Literally the land of my fathers: My dad, my grandparents, my great-parents, my great-greats were all born within a small radius of a tiny town and crossroads that were old long before my appearance on this Earth.
Thus began my fascination with Time.
In the bend of a dirt road stood my grandparents’ home, where my father grew up. My youngest aunt was born here in the same room where her father, my Granddaddy, would die fifty-three years later at 92. He wanted to die at home. He did, peacefully and “full of days,” as the Scriptures say of Abraham, Isaac, and Job: After this lived Job an hundred and forty years, and saw his sons, and his sons’ sons, even four generations. So Job died, being old and full of days (Job 42:16-17).
Likewise, my grandparents saw four generations. They lived to see my children. Incidentally, Granddaddy had a brother named Job who died in the 1920s (he drowned, if I recall correctly; this is a coastal area).
So it was that I grew up on stories of the old days and ways, a little city girl mesmerized by my deep country roots. In my time the once-thriving community was already history; nature was reclaiming the unpainted houses, one by one. Some were still visible through the woods (an early memory: a cypress shingle roof in the treetops, if you looked just right) and others were in various stages of falling down with yards still mowed by descendants.
On this return journey a few weeks ago, I discovered that my grandmother’s homeplace from the early 1900s is being swallowed by the forest:
A terrible jolt, as I can remember it having a hedge, a lawn, a porch swing, a screen door. I remember the layout inside and my great-uncle living there, tending to a patch of sunflowers.
And I knew, prior to this journey, that my grandparents’ house, which stood on the corner a little farther on, is gone.
This story is a little different, however. Instead of the forest reaching its veiny green fingers to reclaim its own, a young couple has built a home right in the middle of what was once my grandfather’s garden. I can’t help thinking how Grandma would marvel at the beauty of this new house and its lovely landscaping.
All that remains here from the enchanted summers of my childhood half a century ago (and from time before me) is the pumphouse, one of Grandma’s crepe myrtles (now wistfully draped in Spanish moss, which never used to be in these parts), and the sidewalk that once led to the front porch of Granddaddy and Grandma’s home:
As a teenager I wrote a song about a sidewalk. Haven’t thought about it in ages:
Where does this lonely sidewalk lead? You think by now I’d know Footsteps into yesterday That’s where I want to go…
I had no idea, then, that only the sidewalk would remain in this place I loved so well, where I used to play outside in the sweltering bug-infested heat, where Grandma would sit at her piano in the evenings to have me sing old hymns with her as Granddaddy listened from his recliner, where I felt loved and wanted and sheltered and that I belonged…
The old dirt road remains, too, of course.
There was another dirt road branching off of it here in the shadows to the left; it once led, Grandma said, to a two-story antebellum house with a double balcony. I could hear admiration for that house in her voice. In my childhood the road was just two tracks through grass and thickets. The path faded more and more with every passing summer. Now you would never know it had ever been anything but woods.
From this vantage point, my grandparents’ yard is on the right, and to the immediate left is an old family cemetery. Not my family’s, although I walked it often with Grandma over the years. When I was a child, I was afraid ghosts would come out here at night. Grandma assured me they would not. She offered this dubious comfort: No need to fear the dead. Fear the living.
When I wondered at the graves of so many babies, she said people just didn’t know what to do for them when they were sick.
It’s clear how much the children were loved and mourned. This tiny cemetery remains painstakingly tended and strangely outside of time:
Hello again, baby Leafy Jean and big brother Leon Russell.
These siblings died a month apart in 1917. Grandma was born three months after Leon, almost a year to the day before Leafy, in the soon-to-be obscured homeplace just around the bend of the road.
Four-month-old twins Audrie and Aubrie died a week apart during that same summer.
The greater wonder, in its way, are the children who survived disease and mothers who died giving birth to them, which almost happened to Grandma: her mother delivered a stillborn baby three months before she was born. My grandmother was a twin. Grandma journaled this because I asked her to; in her writings, she says several women in the community who recently had babies helped nurse her while my great-grandmother was so ill that she “almost didn’t make it.”
—Why am I just now realizing that Grandma’s lost twin would have come around the same time as Leon Russell? Could his mother have been one of the women who preserved my newborn grandmother’s hungry life? if so …imagine saving someone else’s child and losing your own…
So many mysteries in this place. I’ve always felt the pull.
Over fifty years after I first walked this cemetery with my grandmother, I’m awed by the good condition of the headstones. I halfway expected them to be eroding into illegibility — after all, these people’s earthly homes have long since crumbled. No greater mystery than Time…
I cannot linger here, ruminating, for there’s another place to visit. Really just a good walk “around the horn” to the church, a journey I’ve made many times.
This was once the heart of the bustling farm community. The church was built on land given by my grandmother’s predecessors. Her father, mother, brothers, and other family are buried to the right of this crossroads.
Granddaddy and Grandma are buried in the churchyard, to the left.
Such a beautiful little resting place, presently bordered by a lush cornfield. An old live oak felled by a hurricane in recent years has been replaced by a new one nearby.
Grandma would be so pleased to see how well-tended everything is.
There’s even a new footbridge over the ditch at the churchyard, for easy access to the little community center across the road. This building stands where Grandma’s three-room grade school used to, she said in her journal.
Here’s where old and new converge most for me, where Time is most relevant and paradoxically elusive. The spirit of this place is old; my own memories are growing old.
My father as a teenager, in the churchyard
I am the keeper of memories older than mine.
But I came for the new.
I brought my granddaughter, you see.
All along the journey, I told her stories. Of the old days, the old ways.
I brought her to dig for fossils at the Museum in town (which is where the phosphate mining company sends its rejects now, instead of scattering treasures on the old dirt roads).
We found a bit of coral skeleton, shark’s teeth, and some bony things I’ve yet to identify:
Making new memories from the old… even from the ancient, from time before recorded time.
As we were leaving, I discovered that the old library in this old, old town looks the same as it did five decades ago when Grandma drove me to pick out books to read at her house in the summer. I halfway expected to see her coming out with the armful she had to help me carry…
And I think this is used to be, or is at least near, the butcher shop where Daddy worked as a teenager.
There’s so much more to be said about memory, legacy, endurance, overcoming, and family… about the whole spiritual journey of life. The greatest gift my grandparents gave me, beyond their unconditional love and their stories, is that of faith lived out. I learned long ago that eventually there comes a homecoming so bright, so glorious, that all the former shadows are forgotten.
I expect I’ll recognize my little corner of Heaven, having had such a foretaste here.
Until that time, I carry on in the footsteps before me, praying I walk even half as well.
My now, my tomorrows ❤
From Everlasting to Everlasting: A Prayer of Moses
Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God.
You return man to dust and say, “Return, O children of man!” For a thousand years in your sight are but as yesterday when it is past, or as a watch in the night…
Let your work be shown to your servants, and your glorious power to their children. Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us, and establish the work of our hands upon us; yes, establish the work of our hands! Psalm 90: 1-4;16-17
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with thanks to my Spiritual Journey friends who write on the first Thursday of each month and to host Carol Varsalona who posted this reflection and question for July:
Pause and praise God for His wondrous gifts! What are you rejoicing over this summer?
an agreeable or piquant flavor imparted to something.
anything added to impart flavor, enhance one’s appreciation, etc.
piquancy; interest; charm.
liveliness or energy; animating spirit.
the peel, especially the thin outer peel, of a citrus fruit used for flavoring: lemon zest.
—Dictionary.com
I’ve been thinking about “zest” recently.
Truth be told: I needed a “z” word anyway for my post title today, as this is the 26th day of the March Slice of Life Story Challenge and I secretly decided to stick with the abecedarian approach that worked for me last year. “Ta-daaa,” as my sixteen-month-old granddaughter would say.
But there’s also the fact that I haven’t felt much zest for anything of late, having battled viral congestion for the last four weeks, in the midst of this already extremely challenge-riddled school year. One really cannot have zest for sleep, right? It’s an oxymoron. I did crave citrus, however, for one zest-ish connection. Last week I stocked up on clementines and three kinds of juice; nothing has been more restorative than drinking giant glasses of pure o.j. on ice throughout the day. Clearly I needed the vitamin C, for I am almost well now. That plus time…
It just so happens that I’ve been reading about zest being part of necessary human strengths as defined by positive psychology, which focuses on eudaimonia, Greek for “good spirit.” Turns out that zest, or enthusiasm, is linked to courage and other traits necessary for individual happiness, satisfaction, mental health, and living life well. It’s a relatively new and accordingly controversial domain of psychology… yet I hear a ring of truth in it.
Maybe I should say I can taste the truth in it.
Consider these phrases from the Dictionary.com definition of zest: keen relish, hearty enjoyment, gusto; anything added to enhance one’s appreciation; piquancy, interest, charm; liveliness or energy; animating spirit...
In short, a person must have positive experiences to look forward to (akin to hope) that bring true enjoyment. The very knowledge is energizing; so is the savoring of the experiences. In its own way, zest is the antidote to the inertia of despair. If we are zest-deficient, what can we do about it? It’s different for different folks…does it mean finding a new job or career, or being an agent of change where you are? Does it mean taking up skydiving, parasailing, horseback riding, or volunteering in a place where people are suffering? Is zest in itself an end goal, or does it forge a path to a different kind of fulfillment tied to purpose and value?
All food for thought. In the end, zest is a motivator for something intrinsically rewarding. There are people with a zest for cooking, gardening, sports, hiking, biking, singing, building, redecorating… the greatest connective tissue I see is energy. These are physical activities.
I think about writing. I love it. I work at it. I set a goal to write a meaningful post every day last year and I accomplished it. Yet I cannot say zest was often or even occasionally involved…which brings me to ask myself: Where is there zest in my life? Once upon a time, people might have jokingly mentioned the soap; remember the slogan “You’re not fully clean until you’re Zestfully clean”?
As soon as I ask, an image begins forming in my mind…
A birthday party a few years ago, with extended family. The guest of honor, turning sweet sixteen. Dark eyes sparkling, cheeks rosy from all the attention on this special day. She loves acting, her grandmother informed me. Wants to perform onstage.
She could have been me, years ago. I relished performing in plays at her age…I wanted to do it for the rest of my life. Zest!
It is not what happened for me, but as cake and ice cream was served, immense gratitude for the life and family I have flooded my soul.
Zest, by the way, is also linked to gratitude; a savoring, as I mentioned.
I took my plate of cake and ice cream, which I expected to be vanilla, but—oh!
“Is this lemon ice cream?” I asked. I knew it was. Unexpected and amazing. Not tart. Just sweet silken cream, with a breath of light lemon fragrance…
“Yes,” came the answer. “It’s homemade.”
I had to have the recipe. I thought immediately of two people for whom I wanted to make it: my daughter-in-law and my sister-in-law. They love lemon. I like it, say, in old-fashioned (real) lemonade, in my ice water, in pound cake…not so much in meringue pies. This ice cream, though, was divine.
And so I’ve made it several times since, usually as a topping for blueberry cobbler straight from the oven. Last time I made it was at the beach. My sister-in-law arranges for our families to vacation there each summer. She started doing this after her brother, my husband, had a massive heart attack and was almost taken from us. And so we celebrate togetherness and the good life (another translation of eudaimonia). I sat at the big wooden table in the upper room of the beach house while my nephew-in-law cooked dinner. Everyone was laughing and talking, we were hungry from having been in the sun all day, the ocean sparkled like diamonds beyond the windows, and there was a faint taste of salt on my lips as I grated the lemon rinds to make this ice cream.
Zest. For my family.
My sister-in-law took one spoonful and said, “That’s the best ice cream I’ve ever had in my life.”
It’s also the simplest…as the best things in life are.
No machines, needed, just a bit of work and a willing spirit, ready to share.
Of course this post would not be complete without the recipe…
A bit of zest for your day, friends, on the wings of wellness.
Lemon Ice Cream
1 pint whipping cream 1 cup sugar 2 tablespoons lemon zest 1/3 cup fresh lemon juice
Combine whipping cream and sugar; stir until sugar dissolves
Her style is uniquely her own: Everyday, all day, wear a coat. Refuse to let it be removed. Shoe, one of her favorite words. Eyes full of determination— Let’s go, people!I’ve got places to be. Franna’s favorite fashionista.
My precious Micah, 16 months, being herself.
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with thanks to Two Writing Teachers for the monthlong Slice of Life Story Challenge
lit bits and pieces 