Your Daily Miracle: Running Home to Supper

I sit in an intense patch of sun by our glass sliding door.  Charley lies underneath me, basking in the same rare light--astonishing weather that has lasted since early this morning, clearing the sky so we could see the Olympics, their sharp tips covered in bright white snow.

Merry is shoveling parmigiana cheese into her mouth with her fingers in the kitchen.  She just finished some kind of exercise program on her CD, and in her pink tank top she looks just like a teenager.  And is acting just like a teenager.  Rainbows from the prism at the window paint the white wall behind her.

Ah, the sun is sinking quickly.  It has cast some sort of spell on me today, from our long morning ramble through the park and woods this morning to the lazy afternoon while I watched Bea play at Lion's Park on the edge of downtown, the harbor across the road all a "sparkle" as Bea said.  It has stirred in me that tangled web of sunshine memories--early childhood in Bangladesh, wide clay-colored roads and rice paddies shimmering in the afternoon; long days in Kenya when the sun played forever across the wooden floors of our townhouse and lit up brilliant bougainvillea blossoms all over the city, even rambling up piles of stinking garbage.  I associate sunny days with being a child, and that may account for the odd, dissociative feeling I had at the playground today while I watched my almost-five year old on the merry-go-round and chatted to another mother, naming Bea as the last of my children, with the oldest daughter eleven. 

Too, I think I somewhat dread standing by at playgrounds because I no longer claim the comfort of old, familiar friends to meet there, to chat about our children and the long days of parenthood.  And for me, that chapter of children out of school, of mommy-meetings at the park, are nearly over.  May I say that I feel ready to move on?

I find myself sometimes, on sunny gorgeous days like this one, losing my bearings.  I watch other people walk and drive to and from their homes, knowing what they are all about--their careers, their communities, their intact plans for the future--and I envy them.  Then I must remind myself to do what I have always told the girls they must do (and Merry most recently): return with thanksgiving to the wonders of my own life.

A few days ago, Merry and I were out on a walk (something we have greatly been enjoying these days).  It was raining and we pulled our hoods up and down in the capricious weather.  We walked through a neighborhood by the school we love, not because it is particularly beautiful, but because the houses are a generous but not ridiculous size, the streets are quiet, there are woods and lots of children, and it is a hop, skip and a jump from elementary, middle, and high school.  Merry was talking about school and her classmates and also about the houses and gardens we passed, which ones she liked the best.  I suddenly felt compelled to redirect the conversation:  "Nobody knows what God has for us next year," I reminded myself as much as her.  "It could be that God doesn't want us in a house like this one.  We must be grateful for what we have now, for our lovely little red house, and be open to what will come next, whatever it is."  I have been trying to tell myself this very thing, peppered with the endless reminders of what we have compared to most of the world.  And I want to keep my imagination young and flexible, not brittle and bitter.

I remember in college strolling among the big, rich Victorian houses outside just outside campus.  In that crisp fall evening, the smells of supper wafted from open doors, children milled around picket fences, mothers called to each other down tree-lined streets.  Walking among it, an outsider in age and circumstance, I longed for it.  Not for the rich houses themselves, of course, but for the familiarity of all of it, the Norman Rockwell picture of the American family, the picture I can never, after growing up in some of the most desperately poor places in the world, fully embrace with a clear conscience.  And yet I have this absurd longing.  Perhaps, if I sift through it, looking for its root--and in truth, the roots of our longing are never evil but good things--I find this:  a desire to be known, to be loved, to be rooted in that belonging.  How does this happen for the person who is destined always to be transient?

In a memoir I wrote and then tinkered with forever before finally shelving, I came to this conclusion: home is a place we take with us.  It must be.  We find our home in the knowledge that we are known and loved completely; we can draw people into that space to experience it with us.  Wherever we go, whomever we meet, if we are at home, then we will radiate that grace.  And sometimes I am sure that is true.  And sometimes I feel the rawness of my bare roots.  For there is something about the physical, how it becomes sacred.  And home is also that sort of thing, or should be.

A cup of tea placed with certainty upon a table on which cups of teas have been drunk for a century; a quilt spread over a child made by a great-grandmother; an ancient skillet seasoned by a great-aunt: such things are valuable because they draw us back to that certainty that we are known and rooted in some kind of tradition.  You don't need to stay in one place in order to feel it, but the physical things--the things that weighed solid in the hand of your father or grandfather before you--those are good.

And here and now, in this beautiful place, I have had to chastise my own wandering spirit, asking: why is it that the first flushes of gratitude, of the knowledge that you are exactly where you should be, the faith in simple grace, can so easily stray to wishing for what you do not have?  It is a lesson that I must learn continually.  I must return to gratitude like a child, suddenly sensing the chilling of evening air, runs home for supper.  I must return to it again.  And again.

The sun glows orange, and the heat is gone from it.  Every minute the Olympics are shaded bluer and darker.  Even Charley knows the day's glory is waning; he rises, stretches, trots off to find a warmer place after first checking with me to see if I will shift the laptop and welcome him on my lap instead.  Someone must cook supper.  I think it will be me.