Things That Are Lovely

Sometimes I think I could drown inside my own head.  On days like today I wake up with a swirling, dizzying overload of thinking crowding my brain until there's barely room in there for reason.  I lay in bed too long after the alarm, talking myself into getting up.  My limbs felt heavy.  My room, still bathed in early morning twilight wrapped around me, too much like a cocoon.  I knew that outside the covers the chilly air would shock me out of my complacency and I wanted too badly to cling to it.  So I kept lying there, even after the second and third alarms.

My life is quite perfunctory of late.  I do what is required of me and little more. Still with my obligations met, so many things that should matter more seem to get lost in the clutter of my brain.  It's as if I forgot how to discern the important from the nonsensical.  Lost in the limbo of neither succeeding or failing, I feel on the verge of just rolling up in my blankets and going back to sleep.

Last night I heard a talk about storytelling.  The guy said there are three important components to every story. The audience, the characters, and a sense of wonder.  I thought how like real life a story can be.  After all, life at its essence is nothing more than a story with a beginning, middle and end.  Hopefully there's some wonder sprinkled in here and there, and whether we like it or not, we always have an audience.  I am struck by the realization that I have lived my whole life in front of an audience of critics who make it their business to judge, reject, applaud, approve or disapprove of the way I am living my story.  The speaker says we writers must always be conscious of our audience, we write for them, after all.  If they don't like your story, you failed at telling it in a compelling way. I think about all the ways I fail at living out a story of which anyone would approve.

With that on my mind, I fell asleep last night to blissful nothingness.  Dreams did not intrude upon my already used-up mind.  I drifted along on the blackness of night and the silence of stillness until my alarm jarred me awake.  The sound assaulted me so fully that within a matter of seconds, my mind was all aswirl with thoughts of how I fail so often at life.  I refuse to dwell in the past, so today became my muse.  I woke up knowing already exactly how my day would play out.  The story, told before it began.  Maybe I felt as though actually getting out of bed might passive aggressively give the finger to Monday.

Eventually though, I did swing my feet over the side of the bed, flung the covers back and let the cold chill of morning take over my senses.  A few minutes later, I could barely remember my cocoon that now sat wrecked, not unlike a chrysalis after the butterfly finally escapes.

I'm not going to even say I showed up for this day with beauty and grace.  I plodded along.  I grouched and griped and shook my head a million times at all the wrongness around me.  I made my way to work, where a conversation about politics nearly sent me scurrying back out the door, but instead I changed the subject then watched as the arguers shook their heads and griped and groaned.  One left--offended perhaps, but I was in no mood to care.

It's funny to me how everyone is entitled to an opinion as long as they agree with the opinions of those around them.  It's even funnier to me that people with their full cognitive capabilities still intact can lash out angrily at someone who is functioning as best they can, with basically no short-term memory at all.  This is not a demonstration of kindness or graciousness.  It isn't "Christian" at all.  But dare I say what I'm thinking?  No way.  I keep my silence close, almost use it as a shield to protect myself from the verbal onslaught of ignorance that waits to assail me concerning things of which it knows nothing.

It's my job, in a way, to just put up with it.

I'm not so fond of my job today.

When I got home this afternoon I caught a glimpse of my little weedy flowerbed in the front yard.  Tiny purple Crocus are popping up everywhere.  I found the teeny bulbs last summer, buried under one of those pieces of fabric that's supposed to keep the weeds out of your flowerbeds.  I pulled up all the fabric, softened the dirt and left the bulbs there, not knowing if they'd come up in the Spring.  My boy and I got out of the car and walked over to examine them.  It's as if 30 more have popped through the soil overnight, a reminder to me that nature stops for nothing once it's set free.  I wonder then, what is keeping me from blooming?

Perhaps my own thoughts sabotage me; I cannot stop the flood of negative thinking once the gates pop open.  I let the current drag me down.  I get covered up like those Crocus bulbs--blocked from the light and rain and even the mounds of snow that make wintertime the perfect time to hide.

There is a time for everything, and for me, times are changing.  So now, instead of dwelling on all the ways I fall so short in life, I will think of something lovely: My pretty purple flowers, beset by weeds but blooming all the same.


"...whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things."  Philippians 4:8

Love Shows Up

The day of their wedding, my mother readied herself at home.  My dad told me a few years ago that throughout that day, her father antagonized her.  "Charles is not coming to get you." He told her.  "He ain't gon' marry you."  Over and over, as she got herself dressed, her hair styled, her lipstick on, she listened to her father's cynicism until she started to believe him.  But my dad, true to his honest and faithful nature, showed up on her doorstep that evening wearing a suit that was a little too big,  a smile plastered on his face, ready to take her to Preacher Newton's house.  They were married on the back porch with my mother's sister and my dad's brother as witnesses.  It wasn't until after my mother passed away that I finally saw a single photo of them on their wedding day.  Taken at my Grandma and Grandpa Curtis' house, they are sitting on a swing, the wind blowing my mother's dress up just a little, my dad looking contentedly happy with his arm around her.  She isn't smiling exactly.  She looks a little anxious, or maybe stunned that her man showed up and swept her away to a new life.

Parental romance never seems appealing to us until we reach an age that allows us to appreciate the serendipity that must happen in order for love to bloom and grow.  Indeed, not only bloom and grow, in the case of my parents, but to also endure.  

Neither of my folks even had a high school diploma.  My mom grew up looking after other people and their children.  She quit school at a young age to babysit her uncle's kids so his wife could go to work.  She talked often of her father's alcoholism and the way she worried about her mother.  She wanted to protect and take care of her mother even, from the time she was a small child.  She remembered instances of violence, her mother ducking just in time to miss a bloody nose, her father's fist instead, going through a window.  She had siblings then, two sisters, one older, one younger.  They remember things differently, but my mother always stuck to her version of history and I believe it left a lasting impression on the very fabric of her being.  

My dad quit school young to help his father farm. Life was hard for an uneducated man, and my father met the challenge better than anyone else I've ever known.   He started working at the Singer plant in 1970, the year I was born.  He retired when I was 26.  By then the factory had changed hands and he knew how to run every machine in the place.  I don't remember that he ever missed work because he was sick, except of course when he landed in the hospital with kidney stones once.  He showed up at that factory every night, with gouty feet, with fevers, with tired and aching bones from tilling a garden in the hot summer sun.   He rested on Sundays, but not until after he drove a church van to pick up elderly folks and children, then had dinner with us.  Even then, his respite was brief; a nap or two would settle on him during Sunday afternoon football as he sat in his recliner.  Sunday evening he piled us all back in that van and we all showed up at church again for evening service.  Then, back at home after church we ate supper together in front of the TV, watching "The Jeffersons" before I was sent off to bed and he started getting ready for work.  Third shift began at midnight, so his Monday commenced long before we even opened our eyes to get ready for school.

Likewise my mother's work was never done.  She woke up early every morning and got us off to school, but not before she cooked a Southern breakfast fit for a king.  My dad came in the door around seven o'clock every morning to homemade biscuits, bacon, eggs, grits, the whole spread.  Of course, we ate too, but I think we all knew for whom that big breakfast was made.  He slept during the day while we were gone and met us, awake and busy as we got off the bus in the afternoon.  With 3 of us girls still at home and a grandchild next door, my mother didn't get much down time.  She showed up to cook two full meals every single day, cleaned up after them,  then prepared for the next feast.  She kept up with laundry for all of us.  I remember it waving on a very long clothesline that stretched the width of our yard and then some.  I remember my sisters complaining about bringing the laundry in, or about hanging it out for her.  I remember myself, whining about washing dishes.  I think about me in comparison to her--I lack the motivation to put my clothes in the dryer sometimes.  How did she do it all and never give up?

Motivation.  All of us need to find it somewhere.  We need inspiration, something in our lives that makes us keep putting one foot in front of the other, something we know is worth our effort--makes us want to show up.   My parents kept inspiration somewhere in the space between them where they reached not only for one another, but for the family they created together.  It strung us all together like clothes on a line.  It gave us room to breathe, but kept us close, made us secure; it ultimately gave us all a sense of purpose.

The perfect romance never existed.  It never will.  Love, though, is impervious to the whims of romance.  It persists through years of financial drought and illness and the trials of raising children.  It clings tenaciously to whatever dregs of hope it finds and somehow keeps on growing.  Love is, as I learned after my mother's passing, stronger than death.  Against all the illnesses, struggles, misunderstandings and even annoyances that come with living with someone for decades, Love prevails.  Real Love withstands whatever tries to tear it apart.  I believe that even on their worst days, my parents knew real Love.  Their love for each other ultimately nurtured us.  It fed us, clothed us, sent us to school in clean clothes.  It taught us about disappointment and made us resilient.  It grew in us our own insecurities, vulnerabilities and strengths.  It made us girls all seek out that same kind of love for ourselves.  Some of us found it, some never will; so scarce it is.

I can appreciate the bond my parents shared so much more now that the years have smoothed the rough edges of memory and life-experience has taught me how hard-won even the simplest things in life often are.  My parents possessed a rare gem.   They never knew wealth, but knew something that few people find and fewer still are able to keep.  It lives on far beyond who Bonnie and Charles were that December day on the preacher's back porch.  It lives,  scattered across the Earth in the hearts and minds of five girls, eleven grandchildren, fifteen great-grandchildren.  It will continue divide itself across time and space and it will live on even after I am dust. 

The inspiration?  It lives on as well, tethered to the Universe by a single moment in time when Love showed up in the form of my father on the doorstep of the Lee household, ready to take his bride.