The Wonder Years

I spend a lot of time fitting my mom into my life, at least imagining where she would fit if she were here.  My memories of her float in and out of my days and color many of the moments a little brighter, clarifying also many of the dull edges of moments as they fade.

One of my favorite shows, The Wonder Years, is such because I relate so fully to it.  It shows the imperfectly beautiful love of a family in many ordinary moments that come together to form a beautiful story, and also shows how those years, The Wonder Years, pass like the flickering of a lightening bug.  Brilliant, precious, fleeting.

As I watched my children as they played at the library today, I pictured so vividly my sister and I in our brightly colored windbreaker track suits and long blonde braids march into our hometown library excitedly, my mom smiling beside us.  I even remember some of our most loved stories she read to us there.  I can feel the chilled air of impending fall as we walked to the nearby park, and I can see my mom’s wide mouthed laugh as we slid down the slide into her arms.

I can see all of these things perhaps even brighter now as I experience these same moments, These Years of Wonder, with my own children.

These incredibly stunning, fleeting, precious years.

And, I realize now, the years of wonder are not only lived by children.  Parents are lucky enough to be surrounded with the magic too.

These are the moments that, at the end of my life, I will look back on and smile…in utter wonder.

True Love

I dream often of the beauty of childhood.  The tenderness of those memories bring joy to my heart and a smile to my face without failure.  Now, as a mother, I realize fully the work my parents put into making our childhood so joyful.  A true labor of love…a love we do not fully understand as children.

Every day after school, Abby and I would run back into our woods for that day’s adventure.  And, as the evening shadows crept in, we made the most beautiful tales come alive.  I smile at the amount of times we got stuck in a tree, swore we found the most beautiful treasure known to man, built a new fort in the sheltered shade of the pines, or scraped up our shins on the many picker bushes we ran through.

Oh, the smell of those pines on a warm night.  The sounds of our beautiful expanse of nature poured out before us.  We lived in a world of never ending bliss.  Before the darkness fully overtook the day’s tale, our mom would beep the car horn to let us know it was dinnertime.  We ran through the familiar trails and through the field of whatever was growing that year with excitement as our minds ran wild with the new chapters we had just written.

As I watch my babies play, I know that my goal as a mother is to make their childhood beautiful, to help surround them with enough love to help them write their adventures in a forever expanding book of chapters.

And that…parenthood…that is true love.  They are the beginning and the end of my thoughts each day, and I smile at the beautiful truth.  I am lucky enough to be their mommy and to watch the words of their stories spill onto the pages of time.

In My Life

As I held my daughter today, her head resting on my lap, I traced my fingertips over her soft strawberry blonde hair.  It gleamed in the light coming in from the window, and my eyes followed the sun ‘s ray.  Out of the window, our silo stood tall, its shiny red bricks also shone in the sun.  It was a beautiful backdrop to the leaves as they sashayed through the breeze from the trees to the ground.

I love the earth when it is red, orange, and yellow, representing earth’s final sigh of happiness.  And, even though I sat inside that big, white farmhouse, I could smell the breeze.  It is a smell, you see, I have smelled many times before.  The air is sweet, an array of swirling smells carried by a crisp wind.

I do not remember exactly each moment I smelled these smells and saw these sights.  I do remember they all included you.  Your brilliant blonde hair following the path of that crisp air.  You lived for autumn, as I do.  You lived for that final show of beauty, for the feeling of sitting in a cozy warmth together as the world surrounded us in colors.

So many people, places, and moments in my life will comprise what I remember in old age.  But you, dear mother, although taking up too short a portion of it, will be the color. The crisp air dancing through my years.  The sun rays that set my world alight.

In my life, I’ll love you more.

A Great Soul

The winds seem to breathe a little heavier on that hilltop, and it always smells of pine, cedar, and dust that mingles up from the dirt road.  And, as I breathe in the all of those smells of life, I forget for a instant that I am standing at my mother’s grave.

I stare at her picture in the center, vividly colorful, her blue eyes staring right back.  In the shape of a rainbow above it reads, “Daughter, Wife, Mother, Sister, Teacher, and Donor.”  My mom was all of those things and so many more.

The deep pain that begins to build so fiercely inside of me manifests itself on the outside, and the tears feel warm as they run down my face.  After a while, grief lacks words.  You have already said them all.  Sometimes, it is best to let the sadness fall over you.   Because we are lucky.  We are lucky to have loved someone so deeply.  To the very depth of our soul deeply.

When I am ready to shake my head up and down as if accepting that she is still gone from this earth and wipe the tears from my eyes, I walk to the back side of the grave.  It is there that, still through tears, I smile.

“A great soul serves everyone all the time.  A great soul never dies.  It brings us together again and again.”

My mom is still serving on this earth, and I believe she will for countless many years to come.  She is serving not because her earthly body was great, but because her soul was great.  Her soul will never die.  And, in many moments of sadness, happiness, fear, anger, and laughter, she is there with us, bringing us all together again.

My mother was a great soul.  And those ties?  They can never broken.

 

 

 

All Wrapped Up

Sunday morning, as Grace played outside with Daddy, I held Huck all wrapped up as he fell sleep for his morning nap. His eyes were heavy, but he would not quite let himself drift. I held his chubby little hand and traced the tiny folds around his knuckles and let myself be amazed at how soft his perfect skin was.

Finally, I put my cheek against his and breathed in his baby smell and warmth and whispered, “Mama is here. Let yourself sleep, and I will hold you and keep you safe.” It was instant. His little eyes closed, and muscles relaxed, and his pacifier slowly fell out of his mouth.

Now, as I hold my sleeping son, I am looking out the window. The sky is purely blue this morning and is peering through the trees. Grace’s giggles of joy fill the air.

And in this little space of ours on this earth, I know God is laying his cheek on mine and saying, “I am here. I will hold you and keep you safe.”

I think, as the trees stand firm in their roots, the sky shines unabashedly blue, and my daughter dances through the dew kissed grass, we all know we are held together safely in this place of ours.

All wrapped up.

Catch the Wind

There is something to be said about spending time together as a family in this world that we live in.  A world that escapes so many of us each day.  A world that is too busy to notice the life happening around it.  A world that is so preoccupied with the notion of self to include in it the notion of each other.

In remodeling our farmhouse, we have been forced to slow down, take it step by step, side by side.  As I cooked dinner tonight, I watched as Kelly scraped old laminate off of the floor.  Grace, a broom in hand, pretended to mirror his every move. Huck watched the entire scene unfold.  We were together, working toward a common goal.  Side by side.  One beating heart in that old, glorious structure.

Many of us go through life as if chasing it.  We are always trying to catch up with where we think we are supposed to be, supposed to go.  We are, in essence, trying to catch the wind.

In the end, if we are lucky, we realize we do not have to chase life to catch it.  In the end, when we stop trying to catch the wind, we realize it is swirling around us.  Together. One beating heart. One short but beautiful burst of wind on this earth.

Acorns

Tonight, as daytime fled and evening crept in, we pulled the kids though the yard in their red rider wagon.  Stopping beneath the shade of a giant oak tree, we decided to start a collection of the acorns blanketing the ground beneath our feet.  The shadows of the leaves played like fingers on a piano against the tree.  Rain fell softly, hitting the tree like an umbrella, some escaping to us where the beams of sun shone through.

As we began to fill the big white pail, the sun peered through the tree’s leaves like spotlights on the grass and surrounded us in a reassuring haze.  While we picked, we studied each acorn.  Each was different, distinct in its own right.

I listened to the soft thuds of acorns as they hit the pail, gaining new sounds as the pail filled.  While we searched the grass for this evening’s treasure, we talked about the future.  And, like so many of my childhood memories, I hoped Grace and Huck look back on the night we filled that big white bucket with acorns with fondness.  It is a flickering moment among other flickering moments that all meld together to form the whole of their lives.  Lives that are filled with moments of just being together, surrounded by the sun and the guard of an oak tree.

Patchwork Quilt

“Summer was our best season: it was sleeping on the back screened porch in cots, or trying to sleep in the treehouse; summer was everything good to eat; It was a thousand colors in a parched landscape.” -Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

The colors of summer swirl together with the wind to form a brilliant sense of safety in its warmth.  Grace sashays across the dew kissed grass, her dress and hair swaying in a dance together, her giggles their melody.  Huck and I watch her as we lay on a quilt that just freshly hung in the breeze in our backyard.  Huck moves a piece of grass around in his chubby fingers, amazed at that one blade of life.  His blonde hair is golden in the light of the sun.

Grace peeks around another quilt yet on the line and, feeling its warmth from the sun, lays her face against it.  Her fingers trace its colors, a floral melody of yellows, pinks, and creams.  It is alive in the breeze.  The juice of berries drips down her chin and arm leaving summertime’s sweet stain.

As I sit and watch the life all around me and snap pictures of these precious moments, I realize it is not for myself that I take countless photos and write countless words.  It is for them.  They are the stars in the sky, and I their narrator.

Grace and Huck, these moments captured in photographs and words are my love story to you.  I pray that you live your entire life seeing yourselves the way I see you; a patchwork quilt of perfect colors, brilliant, free, and alive in the breeze.  My love for you, dear babies, is like the seams in that quilt; endlessly enthralled with your beauty.

 

Goodnight Song

As I write this, I sit on the brick steps of our new farmhouse.  The colors of countless flowering bushes and trees surround me, and the fresh air makes me breathe a little deeper.  I am smelling life, after all.  Life is all around me.  Even the clouds are alive tonight as they meander through the sky to their destination.  The tips of the trees sway back and forth in sink, as if dancing to the wind’s goodnight song.

It is in the midst of so much life that I feel fear well up inside of me.  I found out last week that my friend with three small children relapsed from her battle with breast cancer and was diagnosed as stage iv.  In those moments, a familiar feeling took over.  A feeling of not knowing.  The many emotions I felt for my friend were coupled with one very raw, primordial feeling for myself.  That could be me.  Any time, that could be me.

Today, I watched as my daughter danced through the yard.  Her strawberry blonde hair followed her spins and leaps and the sun was her spotlight.  My son reached for the beautiful green surroundings that were at the edges of his blanket.  Life grew all around us.  And, as time passed under the shade of the trees in our yard, I made certain to notice everything.  Appreciate everything.  Feel immense gratitude for these moments that we were a part of the life all around us.

As we walked back to the house, I held my daughter’s hand and watched how her hair shined in the sun. Each strand.  And I wished with all might inside of me.  I wished that if I left this earth that she would somehow remember this moment.  Remember it and know that I was always holding her hand.

Because we can never know what our life may bring, tonight, I think I will join the trees as they dance the wind’s goodnight song.  Reassuringly consistent and alive, knowing the wind will always sing this song and that life, because of its fragility, is utterly beautiful.

Alaska

When faced with the diagnosis of a deadly illness, especially that fateful “c” word, your mind fills with countless thoughts, countless emotions, and also a fair amount of space reserved for what takes over: pure, brute survival mode.  I often wonder looking back how I made it through such a terrifying ordeal with what I see now as remarkable stamina for being so physically and emotionally stripped.  During these times, although we face such an uncertain future, our dreams and hopes for that future are strongly visible and are brighter than ever before.

My cancer battle is not one I remember like a story, cover to cover.  My battle is something I remember in brief flickering moments.  Moments of strength, hope, fear, pain.  They all piece together.

One such moment shines through my memories as one of the very brightest.

We see it in movies often.  That moment as the patient lies on the table just before surgery.  They are surrounded by cold objects.  The tray of blades ready to cut into them. The masked people waiting to do so.  Lights.  Bright, bright lights.

For me, I remember most the man who saved my life.  From the first moment I met Dr. Harvey Bumpers, I knew he was the man God intended to be my surgeon.  It was an instant feeling of ease when he walked into the room.  Medically, he knew what he was doing.  Even more importantly, he CARED.  He cared about me as a human.  As a 24 year old whose life was abundantly different than she’d ever imagined.

He remained that way for me always.  Steady, kind, determined to save my life.

And, in those moments, brief and fleeting thought they may have been, I remember my doctor.  A man I trusted and trust with my life.

He leaned in toward me.  As they placed the mask over my face, he asked me,”If you could choose one place in the world to travel, where would you go?”

“Alaska,” I answered quickly.

As I faded away, I heard him whisper, “go there now.”

When he came to see me after surgery, he was smiling the same reassuring smile he always did.  The remaining breast tissue had come back benign, and I was officially cancer free.

In saying this, he pulled his hand from behind his back and handed me a beautiful 8’10 picture of mountains.

“Do you remember what I asked you before you were put under?”

I thought…”Yes! If I could choose one place in the world to travel, where would it be? And I said Alaska!”

He smiled and said, “That picture is a picture I took of my recent trip to Alaska.  I want you to hang it up and look at it every day.  It is a reminder that you will live a very long and happy life, and that you can take that trip to Alaska.”

Every time I think of that moment with my amazing surgeon, I think of how he not only saved my life physically, but his eternal optimism and kindness was perhaps the most important medicine of all.