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.