I don’t know about you but I often wonder when that “Happy Ever After” thing starts to happen. I mean, honestly I have been looking at my watch, standing on the platform in the train station waiting. I have worn my best clothes and my favorite hat and I have been so well intended with my steps to standing there, with that smile of mine that wants to be genuine and real, but if I am honest is sometimes faked to make those around me feel better. Truth be told I am standing there waving goodbye to all those smiling, laughing people (some of who I know very well and some who are strangers.) They seem so alive with their bright, white smiles and their ticket to their destination stamped and ready. They are going to be happy I can just see it in their hopefulness. They are “living their best life” and I am waving goodbye and I am smiling for them, I really am but I am heavy with longing for my ticket and I keep looking for that Conductor and his “Happy place stamp” to come and stamp my ticket, so I can board and smile and wave and know that I am finally on that destination.
I want to fall in love with life again.
I want to see those babies all around me, with their mommas and their Grandmother and I want to have that rush of my heart that says “Mine.” Connection of flesh and bones and blood that binds with history and hope.
I want to see that beloved, who said “I do” and our eyes were locked into one another and we felt the faint rustle of hope in our raggedy ol hearts. The one who remembers to take out the trash and rub my tailbone and cry with me when the news comes that there will never be those babies.
I want to sit outside under a canopy of stars and little lights with all of those who tore into my heart like a wild thing and left their mark. The ones who came and went and promised and lied and lingered and loved and died. I want to see them one more time and have everything be healed as it should be. The bruises faded and the daggers removed, I want to see the ones who left this earth too soon and took a piece of me with them. I want that piece to be brought back, under the canopy of stars and tucked into the pocket of my overcoat with the collar up to keep me warm so that I feel whole again even though I know they must go. I want that to be okay.
I want to travel across the great expanse of land in my bare feet without thorn and rocks and obsession over the uncertainty of the terrain in front of me. I want to be able to look up and see what is right in front of me, beckoning me back into the moment of being happy just walking freely again.
I want to lay in the cool of the surf and sand and see the whales breaching the surface and the intake of my breath with theirs will launch me with them for one brief moment I am spellbound and all else is forgotten. For one brief moment I am that kid again, tangled hair and runny nose across the sand while laughter rings like a bell into the morning air. I want to not be afraid of anything.
I want to fall in love with life again and color outside the lines and build dreams that have me dancing on my toes and running without my chest laboring or my legs aching. I want to be able to look life in the eye, clear eyed, bright, hopeful, insightful, true.
I awakened at 4am again. I want to be thankful (as old people often are) that I awakened again on what might be my hundred thousandth day (who is counting) as life is a gift (we all know this) and fragile (Pandemic fragile) and well you get the gist. So at 4 am I stretched and turned on the lights and read a bit and caught up on FB and kept looking outside the picture window for the dawns light to kiss that huge moon goodbye for another year. I planned my day and I remembered to be grateful. I got breakfast from a mostly empty 6 month old Side by Side Refrigerator and heard that loud noise AGAIN. This is a 6 month old high dollar refrigerator folks and I have called Maytag twice trying to get a repairman out here. I have sat on HOLD for up to an hour on a landline that costs me money every minute I have to call out. I was then interrogated about our household (by a recorded voice) about COVID symptoms and I am thinking what about your Repair guy? They are the ones out amongst people every day while I am quarantined in my ranch house with a really loud refrigerator yelling “I’m only 6 months old and just paid for and I am broken already” or something to that effect. I am starting to feel my blood pressure rise and my cheeks flush red and my husband yells from the other room (Because the walls here are like Carnegie Hall which can be great when I am singing in the shower but for privacy? Not so much) “Remember to breathe” which I do and promptly get dizzy and well, let’s just face it CRANKY. I just keep thinking about them asking if I had an extended warranty? I want to shout “I JUST BOUGHT THE DAMN THING” and have a general warranty. Stop acting as if I am a criminal in the witness protection program because I didn’t buy your extended warranty. (I promise you I did not say that out loud but I wanted to) So now it’s not even 9 am and I am already cranky and still a Christian and hearing that voice telling me to breathe and calm down and say yet another muttered prayer under my breath. I throw on some old jeans and step out into the sunshine to go work in the mud and try to get all of our blessed Glamping areas ready for the season. It will be a month of mud and dirt and back aches and rocking nights and more than a few raised voices between that guy I mostly call Beloved but who can get just as “Cranky Christian” as I can. Our Jesus has had to put up with a lot between the two of us.
The motto of this short story is……we are all cranky and don’t buy a MAYTAG and if you do be ready to cough up a lot of dough for an extended warranty. That’s it! Carry on…..Have a nice day
I don’t know what happened but suddenly I was old. Something clicked off I imagine and the dark circles came and my hair got thinner and silver and my face wrinkled like a prune….seriously…like a prune. I got a sad look from the bone density tech and my weight dropped off. I became brittle literally over night. My eyes are red most of the time with an eye disease my mother had when she was old. Only I am not really old in years yet.(or maybe denial is not a river in Eygypt). I just feel like I have been swimming in chlorine for hours. My ears ring and hiss and roar. My joints pop and crackle (sheesh I sound like a symphony) When I was young and healthy my body was quiet. As in no noise. Now everything sounds either muffled or really loud. What? My Dad turned 90 this summer. He is vibrant and active and healthy. When I was driving and was seeing halo’s and stars around the lights coming at me I asked him if he saw those things too (he said No he just saw the lights) Great..I’m older than my dad. I was seriously worried about that until I removed my glasses and found that without my glasses I didn’t see the halo’s or the stars either. (Scratched lenses) Hahaha!
I also have hair that grows in the strangest places and hair that is falling into shower drains and on black sweaters and jackets at an alarming rate. My goodness what happened to the long-haired girl with the big hazel eyes and the toned muscles and the smooth skin? Where the heck did she go? I miss her. She was a beauty by some people’s estimation. A face for Hertz, a body for Club Med. There were travel brochures with her big eyes looking over her tanned shoulder holding a tennis racket. Now I look in the mirror and I see my mother. Some days I see a really old person, who’s sick and hurting with pain. It’s not easy. Truth be told I am NOT liking this. Not at all Not one bit.
I was reminded today by my therapist (yes I have a therapist) that my legacy will be something much greater than my looks. That if I get to live 20 more years (that would be some feat as I was sent home to die at 24) and I continue to do the work of funding the water wells (we are on our 19th) that for every child who lived and went on to have children, my legacy, my divine purpose will be revealed in heaven when thousands of people come to me to tell me they had life because I lived. I realized that as long as I have purpose I have a reason to live. The orphans and their suffering has been my purpose. That purpose has carried me through years where I gasped for breath with the pain of living. That purpose has reminded me when I saw no hope, that those precious people for whom I give my heart and life are in worse conditions than I am, suffering. Knowing that has prompted me to rise from my sick-bed and fight. For them and for me I fought back from a pesticide poisoning that caused my stomach to shred like I had swallowed glass. Bent over for months I pushed myself to get up, go to a chair, say a prayer, dream a dream, try to eat whole foods again (everything I ate was pureed like baby food). Those orphans, with their big eyes and their protruding stomachs and their skin and bones needed me. I could help them. It pushed me to live again.I fought back from cancer (twice) and I continued to write about those orphans. I wanted the world to remember them, even as they seemed to forget me. Those orphans reminded me of their courage and their laughter in the face of extreme poverty and sickness. I took great strength from their stories. I took great courage from their ability to be thankful with so little when I truly had been given so much. Through no fault of their own they were born in Africa, not America. Through no cause of my own I was born in the land of plenty. To NOT help them is unthinkable to me.
So yes, I am older. I am weaker, skinnier, wrinkling and by American standards of youth and beauty declining. But I am reminded that as long as I have breath I have purpose. I have God in me, I have a few dear ones who support me and my cause, I will carry that purpose to my grave and one day perhaps in heaven a man will come and hug me because the water saved him as a baby and he went on to a long life, fulfilling his purpose to help his people live. It’s a beautiful gift purpose. It changes the world It carries you home.
Oh the blessed feel of water, deep in my soul it cleanses me, I lay prone in my bed a child and I splash in my dreams.
A buck came and visited me while I watered the garden this morning, his antlers twisted and broken and he pawed the ground and snorted his language and I wasn’t afraid. He knew a kindred when he saw one.
There was a beautiful bird, all light and freedom at the bath in the garden cool,she was calm as I have ever been, sipping the water and fluffing her feathers, still young and beautiful. A large black crow came and landed on the picket fence and she startled, the water glistening off of her feathers. She looked at me and I smiled and she flew off, as easily as she bathed. I envied her calm.
I am all below the glistening dew of youth, eyes that are reflecting age. I am the snorting, twisted purpose of speech, because the body has weakened and I find no amount of prodding or pushing will move it at times. So I am learning patience, in the calm of the garden visits. I am learning the blessed piece of silence. I am finding words to encourage those with wings to know it’s song. Sing it, blessed sing it, while you can. This time is precious and fleeting. We think it is a struggle now, just wait. How does one know the hour?
I am blessed because I have survived. Scarred and broken, burned and tortured, the face I see is a warriors face. It can no longer hide the searing losses of dreams and love. It can no longer appear young, unless it is beneath the brim and behind the shaded windows. I am blessed because I still have words and thoughts and stories to share. I still can look into this garden that I built from rock on a mountain and watch the bee’s and the butterfly and the birds give thanks for my efforts.
Oh the blessed wake up call of gratitude among pain. Oh the blessed knowledge of something akin to grace.
The Keeper Of Me 