Here is my confession. I am quick to jump to the wrong conclusion. It is easy to forget the heart of my husband.

Last night in the middle of the night I felt the presence of our dog Maybelle by the side of my bed. Not where she usually sleeps. I thought I had heard a car on the street start their engine and drive away. Opening my eyes, I realized there were still lights on in the house. Slipping on my bedroom shoes, I stepped over the dog and padded into the living room, where the foyer lights were blazing, the front porch light on. Front door locked. Good. Turning off the lights, I glanced toward the den where a low light burned. My husband must have fallen asleep watching television. I decided to let him be. I returned to bed. It was 2:45 AM.

Dozing off, I hear the alarm chime as the front door opens. A few minutes later my husband tries to quietly slip into the bed beside me. I sit up, and with annoyance in my tone ask, “What in the world are you doing?”

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I heard a car horn honk in little bursts down at the road. Looking down from the hill I could see four cars at a dead stop. The honk sounded again and the cars crawled slowly forward. Unusual for this road with 30 miles an hour posted where drivers have decided the law doesn’t apply to them. They have somewhere very important to go and they should have arrived already. As the cars creep by, I notice the cars meeting them are traveling at the same slow-motion pace.

I spy Jeff near the road with his chainsaw preparing to cut up a downed limb. "What's going on?" I call. "There are two dogs standing in the road," he answers. Oh good gracious! They won't last a minute on this race track, I think, panicked. "Call them!" I yell back.

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It is one of my earliest memories; running through a field, Ann holding my left hand, Kathy holding my right. I am somewhere between two and three. It is almost night; the sun low behind the white farmhouse ahead of us. Golden light glows from the glass pane in the front door and from the two windows on either side. We are running. We are laughing. If my memory was a movie, we would jump cut to me snuggled deep in a bed in that farmhouse. The room is dark. I imagine my grandmother has just pulled the covers up to my chin, bending deep to whisper something into my ear; I watch her in silhouette as she disappears through the doorway and into the dim lights from the adjoining room.

These two flashes of memory are the only things I know of my grandparent’s house that sat on acres of rolling pastureland where cows grazed and my grandfather and his sons woke long before dawn to milk the cows and deliver the milk. My grandmother killed and plucked and fried the chicken and fixed the biscuits and gravy to be ready for the men’s return. They would be hungry.

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Being two and a half is hard. There are just so many possibilities and so many limitations that surprise you with their suddenness. I recall a photograph of my angel-haired daughter, sunlight over her shoulder, surrounded by flowers, wearing a pale pink ballerina leotard with some sort of tutu netting, and my oversized tennis shoes, laces untied on her feet – her eyes closed tight as tears streamed down her little rosy cheeks. She was furious because I wanted to take her picture. She had been so darned cute just moments before. I framed that photograph and kept it on my vanity table for years. It completely captured her essence when she was two; from heavenly joy to earth-shattering sadness within one astonishing moment.

Her son just spent four days and four nights with us and I was reminded of this same thing; the terribleness of the twos. It is difficult for the parent of a two-year-old – but not nearly as terrible as it is for the two-year-old. Giggles can erupt into heartbreak in breathtaking time.

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Full of hopefulness early this summer, we planted two tomato plants in pots near the sandbox. I imagined the two-year-olds gleefully picking the cherry tomatoes with their still sandy fingers as an afternoon snack. I think perhaps Barrett got to pick one, maybe two. Otherwise, the green fruit never turned red; the vines which had held such promise drooped from perhaps too much rain and not enough sun.

“Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow?” Now isn’t that interesting that our Mary of the nursery rhyme is contrary? Difficult, disagreeable, doing the opposite of what is expected. My friend Merriam-Webster describes her as temperamentally unwilling to accept control or advice. Does her attitude affect the fruit of her garden? Was she intending to grow silver bells and cockle shells, and pretty maids all in a row? Or was her intended crop something more nourishing?

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When I was barely 18 months old, my daddy decided he and my mother needed to build a pool. I marvel at this. It was in the 1950s.

He had married Pauline, a widow-woman, with two little girls, and Pauline had just completed building her very own brick ranch on the three acres her Papa had given her – not too far from the dairy farm where she had grown up. Now, from what I hear, Joe was quite the handsome bachelor, with his pale blue eyes and dark hair. Pauline had told him to not bother coming around unless he was serious (she had heard rumors of the divorcee he was also seeing) and the next thing you know there was a March wedding in the living room of Pauline’s new house. Ann and Kathy, nine and seven, were elated.

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To whom do you belong?

Our family of origin shapes us. God knew full well where He was placing us long before we entered this world. He chose our mother, our father, and the time and place.

It fascinates me. As the songwriter, Dave Matthews asks, “Could I be anyone other than me?” No. I think not.

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I grew up with the ghost of a man I never met. His name was Joe Farber. He was my mother's first husband, my older sisters' father. There were photo albums of him and my mother and my sisters traveling through the mountains of California or sitting on the front steps of their home in Los Angeles. Or my mother dancing with Joe with gardenias in her hair. The photographs were back and white with deckle edges. Or big and glossy in hand-tinted pastels. There was even a framed oil-painted portrait of their little family that Joe had commissioned when he was in Japan.

Growing up, I thought there was a very real possibility that one day Joe Farber would show up at our back door and my mother would leave us all to be with him again.

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Why do we hold onto those old family photographs? You know the ones; everyone is in mid-movement, looking in different directions, a flare of light obscures a face while someone else falls off into the shadows. Heads chopped off; mouths open in conversation. Those really bad photographs. I have boxes of them.

My sister Ann went through every one of my mother’s photo albums and pulled out the pictures when we were cleaning out the house. She scanned many of them. We threw away the bulky old albums. All of the photographs went into large baggies to be distributed between the sisters. But the loose photographs still float around from Roanoke to Greenville to Atlanta waiting for who knows what to happen to them.

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“You didn’t bring tomatoes with you, did you?” my sister asks as I walk in the door. Four days out of town is too long to leave my vegetables and fruit waiting for our return so I usually arrive with my cooler in tow.

"Yes. I not only brought tomatoes from the house, but we also stopped at a farmer's market along the way and bought more." Since my uncle Robert died, the summer is spent in search of the delicious tomatoes that once were plentiful in his garden. Used to, on my arrival in Greenville, my mother would say, "We need to run up to Robert's and get some tomatoes and squash…I’ve been wantin’ squash lately.”

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There they are- those names typed out in black on the well-worn page; the margins tan from the oil of our fingers. The title reads “Record from the Elias Mitchell Family Bible”. Line one; ‘Married to Pauline Lucinda Wade in Chester County SC. January 4, 1870.’ Twelve children line up below in birth order. But below that, the death order makes us pause.

William Thomas, born October 29, 1870, dies on April 5th, 1874. James Cleveland, born July 5th, 1872 dies August 17th, 1873. Mary Irene, known to us as Aunt Mamie, makes it to adulthood to become like a grandmother to our mothers.  Uncle Lumpkin makes it safely through, as well as Nancy Vistula – who my sister Nancy is named after. But little Sallie Beauford, born in 1887 doesn’t make it to see her first birthday.

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I have been missing my sister Ann the last couple of weeks. Ann died suddenly four years ago and none of us had the chance for that last conversation about goodbye. 

 My mother always had a very practical view of death since she had seen it up close and personal when she lost her first husband in her 20’s. And as Christians, we view this life as the one that is temporary… and the next one is the good one to look forward to. If you aren’t familiar with that view, I will give you a few of Jesus’s words about it below. Rumor has it that Jesus defeated death and my family has always leaned hard into that truth.

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A cup full and overflowing. Extravagant abundance. These are the words that fill my mind this early morning before the sun has risen. Turn out the porch light and pour a cup a coffee. The house is quiet for the first time in eleven days.

Counting. Numbers have bounced around in my brain all my waking hours these past days. How many nephews and their children can fit into which bedroom? How many to prepare a breakfast feast for? How many to reserve a table at the restaurant for? How many bowls to put out for soup?

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The most important thing in our house is a little post-it note stuck to the inside of our front door. When people are coming over, that little post-it note is placed on the outside of the door so that anyone who approaches our home has no need to knock, but simply follow the directions handwritten there to “Come on in!” It is an open welcome, hopefully making all our guests feel like part of the family when they walk through the door.

This is a reminder I need right now; that this house my husband and I have built is not ours alone – it is a home that God has created through us – with the purpose of welcoming others. It is not our house; it is God’s home.

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I am more than what I do. I struggle with this thought here at 2:35 in the morning. I hold Come Matter Here in my hands, my cup of maple ginger tea beside me. I try to concentrate and let Hannah Brencher’s words sink in; 

“At some point, you decide to get over your fear. You say it’s time to not be afraid of whatever decisions you have to make or direction you need to take. 

I look around the room as I work on managing the fear that has me awake at this ungodly hour.

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This is the way we grow, I think, as I watch his sturdy little calves push him across the blanket and propel him around the room. It is the room where I watched my son take his first steps, delighting his dad and me, that evening after day-care and work.

Now my grandson explores the peach quilt with bunnies in a basket and three white kittens in a teacup that was his mother’s.

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she guards the kitchen window

legs splayed out

black

and crooked

and long

her underbelly to me

through the glass and screen.

 

it’s an uneasy peace I have

with this writing spider

who has decided to call

my home

her home.

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“My parents lived a charmed life,” she says as we dismantle it. We sit in her childhood bedroom, drawers open revealing stacks of unsent Christmas cards, paper-clipped newspaper articles with hand-written notes in the margin, photo albums of last century college days. Her twenty-year-old father looks up at us in black and white with a lazy smile - stopped in the middle of work at a drawing board.

“You should keep this one,” I say as I pull that photograph away from its place with the others. It is raining outside.

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