The first Thursday of the month rolls around, meaning it’s time for my band of Spiritual Journey writers to gather and share. The theme for May, offered by Chris Margocs, is beginnings and endings. As Chris points out, May is always a major time of transition for those of us who are teachers; we are in the throes of wrapping up another school year.
The month also happens to hold some significant beginnings and endings for me.
I was born in May.
My grandfather died in May.
Chris referenced Isaiah 43:18-19 in her invitation: Remember not the former things, nor consider the things of old. Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.
What God is saying to his exiled people here, through the prophet Isaiah, is to not live in the past but to recognize his miraculous provision and his ongoing exodus-like deliverance. It is all about reliance on him for the journey… says one of my study notes: “Where there is no clear path forward, God creates one.”
It could summarize my life.
I often write of the past, of time spent with my grandparents. I do so from a place of profound gratitude. They were the joy of my childhood. They lived to be in their nineties and got to see me grown with children of my own. I know that God is faithful to those who love him, from one generation to the next (Deuteronomy 7:9; Psalm 119:90; Psalm 103:17). The legacy of faith is priceless to me. It has framed and defined my entire existence. It is all God’s doing. It is the greatest thing I have to pass down.
But today I will not write of the past.
Today I consider the “new thing” springing forth.
A different granddaughter, a different grandfather…a different path.
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One afternoon while I am at work our son stops by the house to see his dad
He brings our granddaughter who asks Grandpa if she can watch Bluey and can she have a popsicle, please
Grandpa (as always) says Yes of course my little angel
Perched on the couch legs swinging beneath the TV tray mouth stained red and blue she pulls out the popsicle long enough to whisper to Grandpa:
I want to stay here forever
He says I know, honey I want you to
Then she says
Grandpa— I don’t want to die
And he tells her
Honey, you don’t have to worry about that. Jesus will take care of you
(the same thing his mother told him when he was twelve, after his daddy died)
Despite thirty-eight years in the ministry officiating hundreds of funerals
when he tells me what our granddaughter said he breaks into uncontrolled sobs
She is only four
She does not know how damaged his heart is—
stented, patched, burned, stitched more than once by medicine and mercy
And although he often quips about living on borrowed time and being a member of the Lazarus Club I watch him pausing to catch his breath
He does not mind the going whenever Jesus should come for him
If you’ve read my blog for a bit, you know I love birds.
It’s an inherited love.
Or maybe a contagious love.
Either way: I got it from my grandmother.
Some of my earliest memories are of sitting on her lap as she read to me, and one of the books was about birds and their nests. From shelves on her apartment walls, bird figurines looked over us like sentinels. Silent witnesses. “Ornaments,” she called them. One resembled a pair of robins. She lifted me up countless times to peer into their ceramic nest, to marvel at the baby bird inside:
This vintage 1960s figurine is exactly like Grandma’s. Her “ornament” went to someone else in the family but I found this one online a couple of weeks ago. It’s in perfect condition and now sits atop Grandma’s piano in my living room.
There’s another I hadn’t thought about in a while…until my recent sightings of bald eagles, to my great awe and consolation during a brief time of despair.
Grandma had an eagle ornament…whatever became of it?
I texted my aunt.
She has it. She told me that Grandma wrote on the underside: One of my favorites!
My aunt texted this photo. She said: The eagle is yours.
An unexpected, deeply meaningful gift. I am learning that the eagle comes out of the blue, when needed most. Even in my dreams. This past week I dreamed of taking a journey and high in the trees along the roadside were eagles’ nests; I could see white heads above the rims, peering down. Even in the dreamworld, I was awestruck. I woke feeling rested and strengthened. And watched over.
My granddaughters haven’t seen my bird nest ornament yet, and Grandma’s eagle is a way off still. But every spring, my girls stand beside me, marveling over the hummingbirds at the feeder. We watch Mama and Papa Bluebird darting in and out of the birdhouse with insects in their beaks, feeding hungry babies. I’ve held my granddaughters up to see real baby house finches in the nest on the wreath of my front door…which won’t happen this season, as the wreath has been removed. Micah learned to mimic me around age two, when I held her in my arms at the kitchen window; putting her tiny finger to her lips, she’d whisper: Shhh. Watch. Birds.
She is three now. She will remember.
Just as I do.
For a moment, I see Grandma’s smile, radiant as springtime sun. I feel her arms lifting me up for the wonder of seeing that baby bird in its ceramic nest, with its parents standing guard.
And I am quite sure I hear a faint rustling of wings, nearby.
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with thanks to Two Writing Teachers for the March Slice of Life Story Challenge
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
*******
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?
that your first daughter sitting beside me as you receive your Master of Divinity is the same age you were sitting beside me when your father received his
seven, representing fullness and completion
in an endless spiral of blessing that flows on and on and on.
You have always been my joy, baby boy.
With love and gratitude and awe at the divine work of the Master
with thanks to Tammi Belko, host of today’s Ethical ELA Open Write. Tammi invited participants to take apersonality color testand to write an “I am” poem based on the color results and their traits.
I took the test. I began to write a series of “I am” stanzas when the poem went running off in its own direction…
True Color
I am the three bands on the ring finger of my left hand:
one worn by my grandmother engraved with her initials and my grandfather’s alongside their wedding date: December 12, 1936 (the day after Edward abdicated for Wallis)
one worn by my mother-in-law a 1953 engagement between a widow and a widower with two children each with the long reach of duty in Korea calling
one given to me on the day I married thirty-seven years two sons and two granddaughters ago…
a poet named after fleeting morning ice may say nothing gold can stay
On the the fourth day of Ethical ELA’s Open Write, Ann Burg invites poets to “Think of a moment in time— an historical moment or a personal one. Place yourself outside yourself — as a favorite tree, a flower, even an inanimate object who has witnessed this moment…”
The Upright Mahogany Howard (c. 1920s)
I grow old I sigh I know you hear my bones creaking as you walk by I have no mirror but your eyes and there I see my beauty is not faded although I’m scarred and snaggle-toothed… you may not realize my proclivity for touch-memory but I tell you that baby on your lap presently pounding my ivories has the feel of her —one day, she will play and I will respond living on and on in the song for the chords never broken vibrate once more stirring the dust of five generations in my bones… I am your reliquary.
The piano was my grandmother’s most-prized possession. My grandfather bought it secondhand sometime during WWII. My grandmother intended to bequeath it to my aunt, who also played; my aunt contracted MS in her 50s and died before my grandmother. Grandma then offered it to me. I do not play, but my youngest son is an extraordinary pianist with a degree in worship music. His brother’s baby, my granddaughter Micah, ten months old, is already showing an affinity for music. She sat on my lap ‘playing’ Grandma’s piano last week, thoroughly enchanted.
My six-year-old granddaughter found the comics section from the Sunday newspaper I recently purchased (first time since I can’t say when). After poring over the funnies, she asked:
“Franna, can we do the crossword puzzle?”
Girl after my own heart…
“Sure, let me get a pen!”
On her own, she figured out ache for ‘Dull pain’ and treat for ‘Dog’s favorite word, probably’.
Then she asked: “What’s ‘Digital pet of the ’90s’?”
“Oh! Mister had one when he was little,” I replied (Mister is what she currently calls my son. This kid…). “I haven’t thought of it in years. A Tamagotchi.”
“Tamagotchi?! What is that?!”
I tried to explain.
Blank expression.
I looked it up and showed it to her on my phone.
She looked dubious.
There was only one logical thing to do….
It arrived today.
She picked it out (yes, they’re still out there; she chose one decorated like an ice cream cone).
She was, in a word, enraptured. Could hardly wait for the egg to hatch so she could figure out how to feed her Tamagotchi. And clean up after it. That was what puzzled her most when I was trying to explain how this thing….er, pet….works.
She’s a quick study in everything: “It wants my attention! Ohhhh nooo…it’s not happy! All its hearts are empty! Help! What do I do to make it happy?”
We tried to play a game with it but apparently we only made it mad.
Fortunately, Mister arrived around this time. With all the expertise of a previous Tamagotchi owner, he fed this digital pet of the ’90s a ton of snacks and filled all its hearts with happiness.
Then, with pure delight, my granddaughter cleaned up after it.
“When I am busy, you will have to Tamagotchi-sit,” she told my son, with authority.
I wonder if I am enjoying this too much…and if he remembers there’s an on/off switch…maybe I should remind him…
—Nah.
My granddaughter, waiting for the egg to hatch. By the time they left this evening, Tamagotchi had grown quite a bit and remained happy with all the attention it was getting (have fun with that, Son…).
a bit of palindrome written to a picture worth much more than a thousand words, maybe even a thousand infinities, to me
Always remember how much you’re loved my child and child of my child remember how much you’re loved always.
My oldest son and his baby girl, Micah. He named her. Micah means “Who is like God?” Answer: No one, no one, no one…
But the steadfast love of the LORD is from everlasting to everlasting on those who fear him, and his righteousness to children’s children… Psalm 103:17
******* with thanks to Two Writing Teachers for the Slice of Life Story Challenge every day in the month of March.
On the twelfth day of December, back in the Great Depression, my grandparents were married. My father was born the following October in a tenant farmhouse.
That’s my grandmother’s wedding band in the photo. It’s not the one she received on her wedding day. That ring was thin; it wore “clean through,” Grandma said. Broke in half due to overuse, in the days when washing machines had wringers, in an era of canning and preserving, in the time of sharecropping cotton and looping tobacco.
This is Grandma’s replacement ring. She had her initials and Granddaddy’s engraved inside, along with their wedding date. A wide gold band, made to last.
It is my ring now. I wear it every day.
Often thinking of December 12th.
For it’s not the only anniversary.
Almost thirty years after my grandparents married, their youngest daughter got married. On the same day.
She was eighteen. A senior in high school.
Her husband, my uncle, was going to Vietnam.
I went to that wedding. In utero. I wasn’t born for another five months. My presence was obvious; my mother couldn’t fit into the dress she planned to wear. She had to rush out and buy a new one that day.
My young aunt mailed black-and-white baby pictures of me to my uncle on his tours of duty.
He brought these pictures back home with him.
Fast forward three decades…
On December 12th, exactly sixty years to the day of my grandparents’ wedding, my husband and I learn that we will have another child.
A second son. Our last child.
My grandparents lived to see him and know him. To tell him they loved him, like they always told me.
It is a day of remembrance for me, December 12th. A deep and quiet knowing, a dark-blue glittering gem that I carry in myself in the middle of the holiday season. Meaningful. Valuable. Priceless.
I think of the long-ago Decembers. Family gatherings, celebrations. Layers of blessing. A blanket unfolding again and again to encompass the next generation.
I am a grandparent now; the mantle is passed.
It is one comprised of faith. Of courage and commitment. In it lies the story of persevering against unknowable odds. The Depression. Vietnam. In it I find strength for living now. I know that what keeps us pressing on is having someone to press on for.
Numerologists might wax eloquent on the significance of the number twelve, in all its powerful associations. We mark our time by twelves on the clock, by months in the year…there are ancient connotations such as twelve Olympians, twelve disciples, twelve tribes of Israel, twelve of days of Christmas… twelves go on and on. Twelve is considered the number of perfection, cosmic order, completion. Just now I recall that our second son was born in our twelfth year of marriage. I am not a numerologist, only a poet contemplating patterns. Not a mathematician, just a wonderer. A believer. Pythagoras is said to have said: “There is geometry in the humming of the strings, there is music in the spacing of the spheres.”
I sense a geometry in dates and a musicality to years…a song of life and the living of it. For me, this is the lesson of 12/12. There’s something of eternity in it.
Which makes perfect sense, if twelve is God’s number.
The song is love.
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Many thanks to Two Writing Teachers and the Slice of Life Story Challenge community. And to readers…you’re all part of the story and the song.
lit bits and pieces 