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Lost and Found : one decade down
It always happens in the shower. That’s when I find myself revisiting memories and thinking about things I didn’t even know I was thinking about. Ten years ago. A decade. Ten years ago my life looked very different. For that matter, my shower looked different too! For one – we had two of them. (What a gift, people – TWO showers.) My marriage was in a good place. My mother was alive. The view out my front window was Virginia mountain and field and river’s edge. I didn’t know any children by the names of Otto Fox or Piper Finn. I wasn’t teaching school and I was tripping over…
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what started as liner notes from a sermon but turned into thoughts on dying well and a tribute to my momma, who, in fact, did just that
Death. It is the absolute only guarantee in our lives. And that sounds morbid to some. But it’s also true. Last Sunday’s sermon centered on dying well. And the idea that the ability to die well is a direct result of having lived well. Immediately I started writing around the margins of my notes. (It’s funny how you can sometimes hear your own sermon while everyone in the room is hearing another one.) When I think of death, there’s just this one person I think of. Of course. My mother. My momma. A woman who suffered so well. Which is a terribly odd and kind of painful statement to make.…
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a giving of thanks and days I’d rather forget, but cannot.
And then in the middle of thanks-giving sometimes I cry. It’s the thankful. It’s the stacked up, overflowing, spilling out, grateful-for-this-cup kind of cry mixed in with the still-tender, always shocking anniversary of one of the saddest seasons of my life. It’s the anniversary of the beginning of the passing of my kind mother from this life to another. I look at all I have, And all I’ve had. And seven years has truly been but a breath – a sigh and a laugh and a weekend and a joy and a valley and an everything you would imagine it to be. I’m still here. And hope reigns stronger than…
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last weekend I was sick. and I thought about this.
When I’m really sick I think about my momma. When I’m really happy I think about her too. Isn’t that sort of funny? Who doesn’t think about their momma during the highs and the lows of every day existence? People whose mommas live down the street. Human nature is a curious state. Rich people don’t usually spend their days thinking about money. And poor people think about it all the time. Healthy people aren’t spending afternoons pondering illness but sick people think obsessively about getting better. When I was sick recently here’s what I was thinking about my mother. She suffered. Oh, goodness. How she suffered. I was lying in…
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Love Letters
My mother loved tea pots. Lined up across the top of her kitchen cabinets were probably fifteen of them. No – more. I don’t remember. But there were a lot. Various sizes and shapes and colors. And I know they all had a story. But I wasn’t paying enough attention back then. (And for that, I will always be sorry.) But the teapots. All lined up. Packed carefully in boxes for each move. Half of them had some little treasure tucked away inside. Some of them had the tea pot’s own story written down in there in my mother’s harsh slanted cursive on torn pieces of notebook paper. And when…
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the old.
I love a house filled with old. I like the trunks that used to be my grandfather’s and the hat that my dad wore as little boy. My favorite childhood stuffed bear perches on my pillow even now. I like that. Because it connects me Now to Then. I like the old because it’s an open door to tell my kids about The People Who Have Gone Before. You can’t walk through a room in our house without looking at or touching some piece of the past. And Kevin and I are always telling stories to our children about the objects decorating our home. Because I want the kids to…
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the steady.
This weekend Kevin and the kids worked on creating a compost pile. And I worked nearby re-painting an old pair of homemade shutters. My mother crafted them decades ago. (How can I be so old that I can accurately use the word “decades” to describe my own life?) And for some reason those two things made me miss our moms. Mine and Kevin’s. The mothers we can no longer call on the phone to share the story of simple Saturday projects outside with the family. I still have a long list of “why’s?” for God. And when it hits me, when it trips me in the middle of…
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True That Finnian.
We are packing, albeit incredibly slowly. (Today I packed one box. One box. That’s the kind of progress I’m making over here ya’ll.) As we pack we find ourselves running across memories that have been sitting on a shelf for several years. The teddy bear crafted from my grandmother’s favorite blue bath robe. The tie-dyed onesie London wore home from the hospital. My dad’s childhood wind-up bear. My mom’s faded red leather bible. I’ve been sharing stories with the kids as we find each little treasure. And they, in turn, have been sharing stories with one another. As we recounted days of their toddlerhood, Mosely repeated a story about my…
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strawberry memories
Not a single spring has passed for the last fifteen years that has not found me creating strawberry jam just like I saw my mother make. Always in the same too-large bowl in which my mother used to make her strawberry jam. And this year, as well as the past three years, I cannot help but be reminded of my mother. It’s inevitable. First, there’s the bowl. And the act of jam-making by itself. The jam may taste sugary sweet sweet sweet but the experience is always more of the bittersweet variety. I don’t know how to live it any other way. When I stir in that powdery sure-jell from…
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Blessed Be Your Name
Four years. It has been four years since my sweet mother passed away. And I still miss her. That has never really changed. I know I have written about her before. And I am sure I will write about her again. She was my mom. Her life (and her passing) shape so much of who I am. I am sure that is normal. Right? This week my memory was struck again by a song we sang at church. “Blessed Be Your Name” We sang this song at my mother’s memorial service. And I can still clearly recall watching my dad while we sang. “Blessed be Your name On the road…
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love. via sour dough bread.
from the cabin: Bergen Hawkeye at Lost Valley
tuck in
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I’ll buy that.
There something else about that whole Webkinz debacle that I didn’t mention in my last post. (Because who would have kept reading as long as it was anyway?) Little does London know – and never needs to know I guess – that at that moment in that overly-lit store, I would have purchased that kid nearly anything she asked for. Seriously. And here’s why. London, my own ever-changing seven-year-old mini-me, held the orange and black stuffed alley cat of her choice up to me and said, “Look, I have to choose this one – her eyebrows look sad and I think if she comes home with me I can make…
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Story. The Middle.
I keep talking about Story. (The conference we attended. Not just “story” in general. Or – maybe that too.) It was so much good information. And so much good information takes me a while to process. One speaker – this guy – talked about the similar nature of every story. How every story follows the same pattern. Beginning. Middle. End. Usually the middle is the largest part of any story. And the middle usually includes some inciting incident. Some story line, some ordeal, some tragedy, some event, that propels the action of the story. That moves along every other detail. An inciting incident. And after the speaker shared his inciting…
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Fear
I have allowed fear to rule my heart for most of my life. I don’t mean that “most of my life” in a cliche way. Or even in a “most of my adult life” way. I mean most of my life. As in since I was eight years old. Around the time I was eight I developed some hyper-fear that my mother was going to die. I became obsessed. Obsessed. As in every night I crept down to my parent’s bedroom. I hovered beside my mother’s bed. And I watched her. Two sleepy eight-year-old eyes peering just over the bed covers at my resting mother. I just stared at her.…
