I always thought the song of a similar title was inane. Why not keep looking for a way to be with the one you love? Why settle? My grandmother once told me she was in love with a young man in her youth, but she ended up marrying his widowed brother who was 20 years her senior and had six children who needed someone to take care of them. She told me she guessed she learned to love him. Maybe I don't get the song, but I always think of my grandmother when I hear it.
Thirty-four years ago this summer, my new husband and I packed a smallish u-haul trailer with all our belongings and moved across the continent from the Pacific Northwest to the Southeast for what I expected would be two years. We don't always get what we expect. The husband has been gone from my life for 16 years and our two children, born in Virginia and Mississippi, are grown; and here I remain in North Carolina, the place we lived when we became a family apart. I have not used an inherited map on my life's journey, although I expected to. We don't always get what we expect.
I still miss Washington, and I have been free to return for several years. My daughter even lives there now. Why don't I go? Maybe because I am happy here. I have a job I enjoy, a home and garden of which I am enamored, and friends I love and who love me. But every once in a while I get a niggling feeling that there might be more to this life than I am being shown. What is it? Where is it? Is there something more I am meant to do or see or be? How do I find it? Barbara Brown Taylor (An Altar in the World) says, “The last place most people look [for the missing treasure] is right under their feet, in the everyday activities, accidents, and encounters of their lives… We cannot see the red X that marks the spot because we are standing on it... All we lack is the willingness to imagine that we already have everything we need. The only thing missing is our consent to be where we are.” Maybe that is what the song is about.
The sunflowers I planted in my garden from seeds are way over my head now. They have not bloomed yet, but the buds are growing larger. Even in their immature state, they turn their faces to the sun. When I check on them before leaving for work they are turned to the east. When I return in the evening they are looking west. Their heads don't droop as they wait for the sun to come back their way; they follow it wherever it goes.
My grandmother made the best of what life handed her, I guess. But she did not follow the map her life and times, and her husband, laid out for her. My grandfather did not want more children, but she did and she had four; the second one was my mother. I have often wondered how he expected to keep from getting her pregnant, and how she defied him. Yes, I know how babies are made, but in that day and time I can only think of one way they might have avoided it. I guess she was really fertile. She rented rooms in their home and managed the boarding house to bring in money. Later, after she raised the ten children, she left her abusive husband and moved across the country to live near my parents...not the map she was "supposed" to follow. I am so enormously proud to be her granddaughter.
For the past couple of years I have set an intention to notice what is happening around me every single day. I figure I may not recall the details years from now, but hopefully I will remember that I was awake at the time, and that will be enough. Some days I even think to follow through on that intention. But I don't know that I have very often consciously decided to love the place I'm in; to look for and make an accounting of what I love about it.
Growing up, my family visited my mother's home in Tennessee. Yesterday as I sat in my garden in the close, humid, gardenia-infused air, I closed my eyes and went back to those days. More than seeing, I feel myself sitting on the porch swing on the wrap-around porch of my Aunt Fannie's house in Maryville (pronounced Mer'vulle), Tennessee. The evening air has an exotic, unfamiliar heaviness. Fireflies light up the lawn at dusk and we catch them in canning jars with holes punched in the lid. I imagine going to bed on a sleeping porch my mother has described to me--designed to take advantage of whatever movement might be in the air. Thunder booms and lightening pierces the sky. Then the rain comes and pounds on the tin roof. There are no fireflies in western Washington; there is almost never a thunderstorm; and the rain doesn't ever blow in suddenly and pound down for ten minutes to be replaced immediately by sunny skies.
The incredible damp, evergreen smell that drifts through the air in the Pacific Northwest, however, is home to me. The hills and the snow-capped mountains and the driftwood strewn beaches are home. It will always be so because when we talk of home, we are really talking about our childhood home--for better or worse. I love it there; I probably appreciate it more now than I did then. All those years ago I loved visiting the Southeast. And then we returned to our taken-for-granted home. Now I love visiting the Pacific Northwest and I come home to my familiar home in the Southeast. Because home is right here under my feet: my family of friends, the fireflies, the thunderstorms, the humidity.
And so I am not staying inside this summer. I live in the South, it's hot and it's humid. Life is messy and sometimes we sweat. I sit in the shade of the dogwood tree with a book and a tall glass of ice water garnished with mint grown in my garden and a slice of lemon. I still don't like iced tea, but maybe this is the summer I will learn to make mint juleps. I breathe in the unique scent of the south that hangs in the thick air and watch the birds swoop from tree to tree and listen to them call to each other. I watch the sky for gathering storm clouds. If I had a covered porch, I would sit outside and watch the storm. Last night, from my bed under the eaves, I listened to an approaching storm. The single long roll of thunder was a perfect expression of what I am feeling this week. It began in the distance, and approached in a steady crescendo until it sounded as if it were just above my head, then moved off in a decrescendo until it faded away. And then the rain came and watered the garden. I breathed deeply and returned, satisfied, to sleep.
Excuse me for anthropomorphizing, but I am sure the three church windows I planted never expected to be an altar in my garden. Each evening the setting sun sends a ray streaming through the tall trees onto the windows. It lingers first on one, then the next, and the next; and they glow, as they did when they graced the south wall of the church. Altars are not only in sanctuaries. Sanctuaries are not only in churches. I feel the glow of the one who is More each time I observe the sun ray; and I feel--incredibly--full. We don't always get what we expect. But we can choose to love what we get. Maybe there is something else for me, and an as yet undrawn map will reveal the road in its time; but right now the treasure is right under my feet; and it is everything I need.
2 comments:
Beautiful. Just the thing to read on this day of complete silence in the middle of 10 days of seminars. Thank you.
I could read your writing all day long. The way you talk about home touches something deep in me. It's a desert for me, as you know, and while I will never return the thought of it makes me smile. Even so, loving this new home becomes easier all the time. Thank you for reminding me how to do it.
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