of happy hearts and glorious things

as a child i used to sit on the living room floor, slide out the bottom drawer of my parents' secretary until the brass pulls clicked softly against the wood. inside the drawer were treasures — baby books for my siblings and me, old photograph albums showing my brother, sister and me as babies, and a creamed-colored book with gold-leafed edging that contained evidence of my family's beginnings.

it was my favorite — my parents' wedding album — and i would spend hours studying the photographs of the day my parents pledged their troth to each other. my mother, striking in her ballet-length crinoline, my father handsome in his white dinner jacket. they stood with their back to the camera in the center aisle of a church the likes i had never seen. large stone columns stood sentry as my brim-hatted grandmothers, my dapper grandfather and dozens of family and friends gathered around them.

they looked like teenagers, holding each other's hands as the young rector gave God's blessing over their union. (within 10 years, this same man would become bishop of the Diocese of North Carolina. would confirm my brother, my sister and me some years later in our home church.)

i studied the sepia images — the lights hung from the ceiling, the carved fretwork over the pulpit, the stained glass windows, stone floors and marble altar, those stone arches standing watch, protecting them from what lay outside the walls. and as i studied, i wondered what it might be like to sit in a church as grand as that. 

when i was 32, the sepia photograph faded into my reality, and i came to stand myself in the stone aisle of

St. Paul's Episcopal Church

, feel the grasp of those arches and knew i was home. my husband and i had just moved our young family to winston-salem from atlanta, where though we attended church most every Sunday, it never felt quite right. 

that first Sunday morning in Winston, we rose, not questioning where we would go. we set out early — getting to church in atlanta took 45 minutes — and arrived for the 9 o'clock service before the early service had even let out. our five-minute commute left us time to head back home, grab some coffee and start over again, and we marveled at our good fortune. on our return trip, we still arrived early enough to take the kids to Sunday School and the nursery, so the two of us could sit for an hour in peace.

uncertain of this new pace and space, we walked into the back of the church and there it was, the picture i had studied all those years ago. the place where my parents got their start, where i first became a twinkle in God's eye. and that's when home hit me.

that first day, the teacher in my 5-year-old's sunday school class invited us out for hot dogs. in the weeks after, we joined the young families supper club, even hosting it at our house. so easy it seemed to make friends, when in atlanta i struggled to make two close friends in four years.

but here, i wrote essays on my mornings at home, took the dog to show and tell at preschool, walked the baby with my next door neighbor whose son was the same age as mine. it was on the way to st. paul's that one day i found myself singing alone in the car: oh i feel so very happy in my heart, because i was.

we would be there only 18 months. 

the day we found out we would have to move, i came early for preschool pickup, walking into the darkened nave so i could spend a few quiet moments under those stone arches. i found my pew, kneeled, begged out loud for things to be different, for God to let us stay... we had just really gotten started in this place where it seemed so easy to

be

. i cried a bit...might have even screamed in the empty space, but i can't truthfully admit that now.

the arches didn't seem to hear.

we moved, started a new life, found a new church that has become more of a home to me than St. Paul's ever was. my daughter barely remembers her time here, and my son not at all.

but still.

///

ten days ago, we were in town for a family wedding. finding ourselves with an idle hour or so, i asked my mother if she'd like to go to her old church. it would be her first trip there in 61 years (61 years and two weeks, she reminded me.) so we drove up the meandering hill toward the church, and i almost lost my way.

'it's that way,' she said, pointing, never minding that she was 24 years old when she last made this trip. 

the stone bell tower stood right where we'd left it, and i hoped that a June saturday meant the doors would be open, though when we checked they were locked. we took a picture of her in front of the bell tower anyway, talked about that day so long ago in her life, then slowly made our way to the car.

just then i spied a man, keys jangling from his belt, slip out the side door. i approached, asking if there was any way we could get inside, and he pointed to the door he would happily unlock for us.

'take your time,' he said, slipping away quickly as we walked into the narthex. mama edged her walker onto the stone floor of the nave and stood, taking it all in.

at just that moment, the organ shouted through the stone, "Glorious things of thee are spoken," and i couldn't help it, the tears just came. i watched mama, her own eyes wet, but her mouth forming a smile.

///

my husband and i have a habit when we visit churches of slipping into a pew to say prayers for our family. from the corner of my eye, i saw him edge into a pew in the front. (didn't he remember that we always sat in the back?). i didn't want to leave mama, so i motioned to her to move down the aisle toward the pulpit.

she shook her head no, held onto the frame of her walker, listening.

"glorious things of thee are spoken/Zion city of our God; he whose word cannot be broken/formed thee of his own abode; on the Rock of Ages founded, what can shake thy sure repose? with salvation's walls surrounded, thou may'est smile at all they foes."

as i listened, i thought about all my mother had seen of this world from her last day in this church — her wedding day — to this one, the day her grandson would be married. i imagined what she might be thinking of that life well lived, the heartache she must be feeling without my father by her side this time. my family began on this particular rock, and God had formed it as he saw fit, and in my thinking, though Daddy isn't with us physically anymore, the fit was just right.

there is a line later in the hymn that says:

safe they feed upon the manna, which he gives them when they pray.

my family has prayed plenty, has seen plenty of manna in its time, and on this day both my mother and i felt full to bursting with it.

'i'm ready to go,' she said, just as the organist ended hymn 522 and moved on to another. as my husband helped mama, i walked up the aisle to about the fifth row on the right and took to my knees. i asked for blessings on my nephew's new marriage, just as God had given my parents so many blessing they'd begun to feel first in this place. i asked for guidance, for blessings on my children and gave special thanks for my family gathered to celebrate, when for so many weeks we have felt so little joy. and i thanked God for this moment with my mother, etched forever in my mind like the stone arches of this beautiful church that was built the year my parents were born.

'tis his love his people raises over self to reign as kings: and as priests his solemn praises each for a thank offering brings.'

glorious things indeed. amen. 

susanbyrumrountree.com is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.

a toast to a happier time

a year ago today, my entire family gathered in the great room of a rented beach cottage to make a toast. to the day, 60 years before, when what would become our family took root. on this, my parents' 61st wedding anniversary, i say thanks to God that we had that time together, however fleeting. it's been a bittersweet week, remembering where i was when i took the pictures posted here. thinking of the quiet chats my father and i had each day, when he climbed the two flights of stairs to see what we were up to. strolling together down the rickety pier behind the cottages to see if any fish might be biting. sharing a meal and talking about his life. just watching him watch his grands and great-grands. marvels to me.

my parents' dance is over, sadly, but today i just want to be happy that they took that first dance together long ago.

Save the last dance

They met in the hallways of Baptist Hospital in Winston-Salem in the fall of 1951. Not long after, the skinny young man in the white coat asked the wavy-haired Florida girl if she would like to go to a med school dance with him. 

Two weeks later, he asked her a bigger question: Will you marry me? And on June 14 the next year, she did. 

And the day after that? He graduated from Bowman Gray School of Medicine. All the family was coming anyway, so what better time to get married than the day before you become a doctor?

My mother often said Daddy didn't want to go to Louisville (the location of his internship) alone. So she went with him, and two weeks shy of their first wedding anniversary, my brother joined them in their little apartment with the Murphy bed in the wall.

In those early years, the young Byrums would not often be together. Mama moved with my brother to live with my grandparents, whom she had really only met a couple of times. Daddy joined the Navy, spending his days in the cramped infirmary of a destroyer, tending to the medical needs of other young men his age. He has a certificate from that time that says he crossed the Arctic Circle.

When he came home, they moved to Newport, Rhode Island, then back with my grandparents. Daddy left again, and while they were living apart, my sister was born, the story of her birth a favorite of my grandfather, who drove my in-labor by the hospital entrance because the February fog was so dense.

When my father left the Navy, they looked around for a place to settle down and found a spot just an hour from my grandparents. Within a year, they had a house and another baby — me — Daddy tending to the needs of patients who would come to him for the rest of his career —more than 50 years.

I wrote about them last year

here.

Little has changed except they are moving a little slower, but I marvel at the fact that my parents continue to grow closer today as each day passes.

This week we have gathered — 23 of us (with two pending) — to celebrate the fact of them and their 60 years together, and that what seems to us to have been a hasty decision back in 1951 has turned into a pretty remarkable life.

Each day someone new has arrived to join our celebration. Grandchildren. Spouses. Great-grands. Earlier in the week, we even gathered in a nearby gazebo to toast the newest union-to-be, all of us weeping after my nephew proposed to his girlfriend. What a joyful moment for us all.

Mama has enjoyed sharing the story of how she met my dad with each new face. Daddy checks his watch and asks who is coming next. By this afternoon, we will all be in place, and we have a few special things planned for them to mark this day in our family history.

Last night, Daddy stood before supper and thanked us all for coming, and for being who we are. He said he was proud how we are living our lives, and though he and my mother could not take credit, they would like to. 

Well. 

"There was more I wanted to say but I have forgotten!" he said then, tempering the tears that had formed at the corners of all of our eyes with the subtle humor he is known for. I watched Mama sitting in the chair behind him, looking up at him, her blue eyes sparkling.

"Would you like to go to the dance?" he asked those years ago. My mother has never felt she was very good at dancing, but when my father took her in his arms that fateful night, somehow she stayed in step. For 60 years. Imagine.

Happy Anniversary B&Pop B. May the dance continue. 

©susan byrum rountree, june 14, 2012.

writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.

nobody's fool

anyone who has known my husband for more than 20 minutes long knows he is no fan of travel. I say that with a caveat: it's the to and fro and not the destination that often finds us ready to change our plans and head to the nearest divorce court home.  if we are driving, whether it's to church or to the peach state, he drums the steering wheel, tries to pass on the two lanes just where i know he shouldn't, fumes at drivers around him though the only person who'll hear him is me. flying can be worse, what with automated check-ins and tarmac delays, tiny aisles and arguing toddlers punching our seats from behind. (there, now, honey, don't blame me for the fact that you forgot your iPad!)

i'm thinking if only we could sail to where we're going, a thousand arguments over the past 32 years might never have happened.

sail. that's what i said. if we could close the back door and head to the dock, step on board and sail ...  away. 

well, that would be my husband's solution. i'd be busy searching google for the nearest five star hotel with a boat landing, spa and freshly-pressed sheets to break up the trip.

the skipper, as we call him, got his first boat some 15 years ago, and now we (he) mans boat #6. this last one we (i) named Fortune's Fool, because the skipper certainly has spent more than one fortune on his beauties boats and their many accoutrements. (i have used this information when i want to buy myself high-priced boots or cameras — i don't have a sailboat, i whine, and not once has he ever said go get one.) and no, i didn't really mean anything by choosing a name connecting my husband's prized possession to the world's most famous star-crossed lovers. really.

when i married him just 11 days shy of 31 years ago, the only boat this skipper had ever been on was my father's Boston Whaler, and in my memory only once... (my daddy loved that boat, and when he sold it, my mother threatened to lie down in the driveway to keep the buyer from pulling it away. so when the skipper said he wanted to buy that first day sailer, i knew what i was up against.)

i should have planned our wedding date better. he has spent at least one of our wedding anniversaries at the annapolis boat show, though i'm not complaining. really.

well, sort of. i thought that first boat would be the end of it, that he'd get the water out of his bones and take up golf. he sold that boat, buying a new one (slightly soaked) before the old one had even left the yard. and he kept on selling and buying until he had to hire a crane operator to put the last boat in the water. whether it was the skipper's naivete or the boats' fault, i was never sure. he kept saying he was buying bigger and better boats for me.

this, from a man who grew up landlocked. he didn't particularly like the beach, though he has come to understand my need to talk to the ocean from time to time. yet he drives an hour one way down country roads to get to his beauty, and only always when i am along rarely does he try to pass the slow poke. he is that happy to be going.

i don't go sailing often enough for him. he brings his little cooler into the kitchen on a saturday morning and i count how many hours i can nap chapters i can read in the hours he'll be gone.

i like sailing. once we are on the water and i have a cool beverage and friends to laugh with and cute cocktail napkins with sailboats on them to serve with my provisions ... i really do. it's the prep and the hauling to and fro and the sweating in the cabin on a very hot summer day that just spoils my outfit, face and hair. it feels like camping to me, which leads me to camp, the memory of which still haunts me, so more often than not, i've stayed at home.

but two weeks ago, i woke on a saturday to a stiff breeze and 60 degrees and it was just too pretty to nap read. 

'i'm not going to take you if it takes two hours to provision!' the captain barked. 

was stopping for a sub sandwich to put in an itty-bitty cooler too much trouble?

apparently not. i even took my new sailboat camera, hoping to take some pictures for myself him to show his sailing buddies. and as we sailed in the crisp wind, the skipper started telling me about the new mistresses boats he had his eye on. seaworthy. as in the atlantic.

oh dear.

the skipper has a big birthday coming up in just over 40 days. when i asked him what he wanted to do, i knew it would involve sailing. so we packed up our grips and headed to the airport (it was too early for anybody to be on the road, though as usual he couldn't get his card to work in the automatic check-in) so he didn't really grumble about it too much.

skipper jr was in tow, and the three of us met up with the pea and her prince not without major angst from the skipper trying to find the rental car place and a parking place along a crowded street on the aft deck of a restaurant in Portland, Maine, where all you could see anywhere was two- and three-masted schooners, sailing, sailing. we could feel the tension lifting just a bit.

we'd made a reservation to sail on a three-masted schooner in boothbay harbor, maine, at 5 o'clock — an hour from our current port o' call — and we were late. we zoomed ahead of the kids, the skipper weaving in and out of traffic again, me wishing i'd brought a life vest in the car to keep my delicate skin from bruising as we cruised.soften the impact of the to and fro.

i texted the pea: where are you? knowing the skipper would be crushed if we missed the sail because of their dawdling. 'we are going as quick as we can' she wrote back, and though she didn't say 'dad needs to chill' i know she was thinking it.

we reached the boat with 10 minutes to spare. the kids and i sat, me promising our few days in maine would bring us a new man, now that he was on the water. i'd seen it happen just last year.  i sensed they didn't believe me.

then we set sail (with a captain and first mate), and as the boat yawned, the skipper smiled. he talked. he chatted it up with the captain. he leaned on the rails. he laughed more than a few times, put his arm around me even, watching the water, the sails stretch, giving way to his love of this thing that only he can really understand.

the kids were amazed, that the secret to calming their father's stormy demeanor was as simple as water, canvas, wood and wind.

on our second day, we climbed aboard another boat, this one motor-powered, and headed into the vast atlantic toward a tiny island off the maine coast. the skipper stood on the bow in his yellow slicker, watching the swells and looking for all the world like a lobsterman scouting out his traps. and he was smiling, once again.

later and back on land, the skipper eyed a burgee flying with the colors of our seaside respite. that would look nice aboard the Fortune's Fool he said more than once.

taking the hint thinking ahead for once about his Christmas list, skipper jr inquired at the front desk as to where he could acquire said flag for his dad, but there was none to be had. a day later, i asked the same thing, and of course so had the skipper. i found myself wondering how we might have one made as a surprise.

it was spitting rain at checkout, winds skating over the bay at close to 20 knots. time to go home. but as the skipper headed into the the cottage for one last walk-through, i saw him toting the burgee. the innkeepers had somehow found an extra, so they handed it off for the promise of a good review on travelocity.

our week was, to use a boating term, quite yar — as katharine hepburn said in the philadelphia story. (My, she was yar...easy to handle, quick to the helm, fast, right. Everything a boat should be, until she develops dry rot. ) and so was the skipper.

if you don't count the money we spent or squeaky floors of our cabin, or the fact that in the wee hours of our last morning, someone quite large and ungainly in the adjoining cabin took a tub bath, and we heard every slap squeak against the fiberglass tub wall. and the groan when they tried to stand up.

it's a rainy day, but guess where the skipper is? off to pat the fortune's fool, to mend her lines and set the halyard flying. 

i'm hoping for a few more days of yar before the dry rot begins. and i'm searching my new iPhone maps to see if there indeed might be a way to sail wherever we are headed next.


writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.

guest blog — runs in the family

today writemuch has its first guest blogger! john mccormick jenkins, my sister's youngest son, is a bit of a writer himself, though he claims not to have written since college. when he asked me what he should write about, i suggested he tell you about our week with all the FAM. i've enjoyed my few days with him before my own kids joined us for our first family beach week in many years. everybody loves john, especially me. we are like spirits. both of us spent the first few months of life crying (though he outgrew it way before i did), and i see bits of myself in him in how he looks at the world. i am honored that he wanted to post on my blog. enjoy! sbr

++++++++

The last beach trip I can remember was one of the many times I was jealous of my brother. I believe my mom, sister and I had driven to the Outer Banks to meet our family for the annual Byrum Family Reunion. My brother and Dad, on the other hand were driving from Iforgetwhere, hot off one of my brother’s AAU baseball national tournaments. I can't remember if I was jealous i didn't get to commute with the guys, or if it was the actual baseball tournament my brother got to compete in. Most likely, it was that my dad had bought the Cool Runnings soundtrack on cassette tape, and I was imagining them listening the whole drive without me.

john mccormick jenkins with betty jean mcormick byrum

I actually carried some sort of envy for everyone I saw on our regular beach get togethers. I was jealous of my cousins Kip and Kendall for always seeming to have it all together, and I was jealous of my cousin Sam for making not having it together look so fun. I was jealous of my sister Hooks and cousin Meredith for knowing how to make everything fun, and of my brother Jay for just knowing everything. And finally, I was jealous of my cousin Graham, the closest to my age, for not really caring about what our definitely judging (but loving) family thinks about his every move.

This year, we are back together again, for the first family beach trip in a long time and though much has changed, a lot is still the same. There are a lot of similarities between the 8-year-old me and current-day me. Eight-year-old John could make the most of a rainy day by dressing like a robot, pirate, or whatever he felt that day. Yesterday, I must have felt like a rock and roll star. My cousin Sam and I jammed out on our guitars and gave a G-rated performance for our whole family. I think it went well.

A major difference is all of that envy is now transformed into admiration and pride. I am proud of my cousin Kip for still being well put together, this time with an MD behind his name. I am proud of my cousins Kendall and Sam for being amazing parents to their beautiful children. My sister makes just spending time with her in conversation fun.  My brother still knows everything, but I am thankful now he shares his knowledge with me, and we can have pretty funny conversations instead of pretty brutal arguments. My cousin Meredith still bring fun to any day. She arrived today, but I wished she had been here to liven up our rainy day blues yesterday. And again last, my brother-in-age Graham. He does not always express it, but the guy can find humor in anything. Things that rile me up, he just shrugs off. I guess I am still a little jealous of some things.

I could have saved you all a lot of time. Instead of listing all of my cousin’s best attributes, I think I could have just described the reason we are all here. My grandparent’s, B and Pop B will be married 60 years tomorrow. They have a lot more than the characteristics I just listed that not only make them the best grandparents I could ever ask for, but they make all eight of us who we are. I look at Kendall, with her hands on her hips just watching
her daughter LG crawl around and imagine B watching any of her children that very same way. I see Pop B’s thoughtfulness in the proposal my cousin Kip made to his (now fiance) Mad Dog. I also see Pop B’s knowledge mixed with B’s ability of persuasion in Jay. B’s ability to just get stuff done is evident in my sister, who just now interrupted this blogging session to wrangle me to carry the groceries upstairs because they needed to be put away RIGHT NOW. Graham has Pop B’s subtle sense of humor that can infect the whole room with a glance or just a word. When I saw B giggling on the couch during our performance last night, I imagined Meredith wiping the tears from her eyes from a laugh attack. Sam demands the attention of the room without even trying, much like B can do, whether to tell a joke or hold a conversation —when either of them open their mouths, everyone wants to listen.

Along with all of these things, B and Pop B do hold one thing I am an odd mixture of proud/envious about: the secret of finding the one you love and holding on to them the same way on Day One as Day 21,900.

Thanks B and Pop B for always being a great example for your children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren. Any of us will be lucky to live a life even a little similar to y'alls.

writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.

the joy between the lines

Story sustains me. I used to comb my parents’ wedding album for some hint of who they were as young people, thinking somewhere hidden in my mother’s crinoline or my father’s slim smile was a clue to what I should expect of a marriage of my own. 

I once asked them to write their story, to recall what life was like when they were my age and busy parents of young children. I suppose I hoped their own love story held truths for me, too, and that my husband and I could sustain our marriage as long, though at times it didn't seem to me that ours was as as happy. 

Married 60 years next year, their sense of romance lingers, clear though those old photographs have faded a bit. They have yet to give me the written clues I need to ensure my own marriage will last. Maybe they are waiting until the 60th to reveal it, when they will gather with kids and grands and great-grands — so they will only have to say it once.

My kids, I vowed years ago, will know their story and our role in it even if they don’t want to. I kept my daughter’s early history in a journal, recording my dreams for her each year on her birthday.  I gave it to her at 18, and that summer decided that a pre-college mother-daughter adventure was a good idea, a way to give those old journal words life. Somehow we made it without too much argument the 500 miles from our home in North Carolina to Georgia, angling down wide strips of painted road with thousands of other summer travelers on their own pilgrimages, to Perry, where her story began.

When I moved to Georgia at 23,  I was single and knew just one person, a girl I'd gone to j-school with at Chapel Hill who worked for the paper there. It was the first real risk I’d ever taken in my life.

A year later and married three weeks, I moved to Perry with my new husband — whom I'd met on my first Georgia day — into a two-bedroom apartment with gold shag carpet and a landing where our collie could sit and look out the window. 

On our visit, the Pea and I drove past that apartment, where on move-in day, Rick and I picnicked with his parents on the carpet while we waited for the moving van; where the first bread I ever tried to make fell flat; where we staged our first Christmas photo as a married couple. There’s the dog’s window, the stoop where he used to sit.

A large willow oak stood at the foot of the sidewalk that day, but I didn't remember even a sapling there. Maybe that was where I tied the dog the day he ran away. It had been 20 years.

“It looks like the slums,” my child said, noticing, as I did, the chipping paint, the uneven blinds in the windows. Her idea of a first apartment even at that time was the New York City brownstone she now lives in with her husband, where her own marriage is just taking root.

Her father and I bought our first chair together with wedding money when we lived in that apartment, and an antique table from a flea market. We found an old chestnut jelly cupboard in a barn and refinished it, a cupboard that now holds all my wedding crystal.

 Living so far away from my family, my young husband was all I had then, he and our collie, Bogey. Without a job to occupy me at first, Bogey and I would wait for him by the window fan in the Indian summer heat.

In those early months I put into practice what I’d thought marriage meant. I set the table with our new everyday dishes on a tiny veneered table we borrowed from my mother-in-law. I used the matching placemats we’d been given, pulled out new pots and improved on my mother’s spaghetti sauce, made New England pot roasts from my new Betty Crocker Cookbook. We bought our first Christmas ornaments, hanging them on a tiny tree in the living room. They remain my favorites, even now.

Shortly before our first anniversary, we bought a house, setting up the tripod in the front yard to take the first picture of our anniversary album as the gnats swarmed around our eyes. My husband's father had been operated on with a brain tumor the day before, and in the picture, Rick holds tight to me as if he will never let me go.

+++++
Rick and I married 30 years ago today. We’d met on the evening of that first Georgia day a year and a day earlier. He'd hosted a party at his house for people at work, and call me crazy, but I knew I would marry him as he stood by the car door for me at the end of the evening and said his goodnights.

The writer attracted me at first, a man who could assemble words with grace and clarity and emotion. His genuine interest in my life and dreams kept me interested. In those early months he told me that he fell in love with me for the same reasons.
We said our vows in my hometown church in front of a small gathering of family and friends, he weeping as he said the words, me wondering if I could ever love this man as deeply as he deserved.

Only weeks after we met he had confessed to being in love with me, the kind of love that leaves you breathless; two months into our courtship he asked me to marry him. Ecstatic, I studied the pages of Bride’s magazines until they were dog-eared. But there was precious little in those magazines about anything but wedding. No advice, really, about how to live beyond that first beautiful fall day. Nothing at all about keeping what turned out to be a living breathing thing alive for years.

On our trip back to Perry, I wanted to tell the Pea something important, to give her the secret of how to build a long marriage. But why then? She didn't even have a boyfriend at the time, and to be honest, her dad and I were not in the best of places at that time, so I wasn't so sure I had any answer to share.

++++
Our mother/daughter team meandered through the streets of Perry that day in 2002 and she thought we were lost. 

“Why don’t we just forget it?” she said. I’m usually so good with directions but did feel lost, slowly creeping up a hill that looked vaguely familiar.

I will find the house if we have to stay until dark, I thought, but then there it was, the brick ranch with the planter out front where geranium blossoms as large as softballs froze red as a still life the day before the Pea was born. There is the picture window, trim still painted the beige I knew.

“We lived in that?” she asked, knowing nothing then of the blindness of new marriage. Suddenly I saw my husband in the back yard, spray-painting a $5 yard sale bassinette she would sleep in. There I sat in the corner chair of our bedroom, stitching his Christmas stocking: a Mother Goose house, the sleeping heads of children tucked and waiting for Santa to arrive. And there I sit at the living room desk writing a journal to my unborn child, reading Gone with the Wind for the first time, later bathing the baby on a sponge in the tiny bathroom sink. I couldn't imagine how I could have forgotten it all.

In that house, my husband and I began to bring real shape to our marriage, to establish routines we have kept all these long years. With no money for dates, we spent Saturday nights watching Sonia Henie skate across our tiny black and white television screen; played Scrabble until the tiles ran out. We pulled up the carpet to find polished wood floors, stripped the lilac wallpaper that covered the master bedroom walls.

The woman who lived in the house before us had made it her home for 30 years. She left us a note when she moved away, wishing us all the happiness that she and her husband had known in their life there.

Rick brings me coffee in bed on weekends, a ritual he began in that little house. If he came home during the day while I was at work, he would leave notes for me and the dog. I cherished them, though I often forgot to tell him so. And I'd almost forgotten about them until we visited that house. 
It was there we plotted our future together on weekend mornings with the dog at the foot of the bed. Babies, better jobs, books to write. And it was on one of those Sundays together that the Pea herself went from "a twinkle in God's eye" to real.

As I sat on the curb outside the house, it hit me: We had lived the life housed in the stitches of the Mother Goose stocking, right down to the daughter asleep in the attic. Our kids were almost grown, the business thrived. I had written books in the house with windows looking over an azalea-lined back yard, bluebirds flitting in and out. And I'd almost missed the dreams revealed in those stitches, for the fact of living them out.

I longed to linger there, to peek into the windows of our little house, to find a young man who once on a rainy winter Sunday evening combed the shops in town for a frozen chocolate pie to share with his expectant wife. I wanted to watch him mow the zoysia in the back yard, walk the dog, powder the baby, to drink him in again like I did when we were young.

Turns out, what I thought was my daughter's trip to find her story, was actually not hers at all. And I felt ashamed that far too many times I had not done my part to sustain the joy between the lines.

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What is it that happens in marriage, makes its inhabitants needle the warts instead of the wonder? Too often, we choose to overlook the wonder, when the warts are so much easier to see.  

A lasting marriage — 30 years, 50, or 60 like my parents — is two people, a life together dreamed about and lived out, shared and fought over, even when it is not always happy. The word, happy, seemed so easy to define when I stared in the bright faces of my parents captured in sepia on their wedding day. Arm in arm and smiling. Happy. But now with these 30 years of my own marriage behind me, I think I finally understand.

Though the margins of our life together have stretched well beyond our hopes — and too often to uncomfortable limits — the reasons that pulled us together in the first place are still recognizable at our core. 

++++
Oct. 10, 2011: As the Pea and her Prince stand at year 2.5 of their own happy start, here is what I will say to her now: Hold onto your hope, savor your story, or you might just lose it in the middle of living it out. 

We didn't, in the end, lose ours. Now I know that reality sometimes changes the shape of your hope, becomes your history and redefines your dreams as you are living them out. Though through the years it might have looked to us like we might unravel, we didn't, in the end, let go of that happy core. 

 

 

9/11/11

we sat in upholstered chairs this morning in a small Episcopal church in mid-coast Maine. no kneelers, just clear glass windows looking out over scrubby pines dotting the landscape. save for one small stained glass window above the altar depicting Jesus calming an angry sea, and these words: Fear not.

we shared our chair pew with four friends we have met in the past eight years. the six of us are in Boothbay Harbor taking in the crisp air and celebrating 80 years of marriage between us. at supper last night, we shared memories of our earliest years as married couples, laughed at our naiveté and marveled at our sticktuativeness if there is such a word. the oldest among us married at 22 and 23, will celebrate 40 years together on Sunday. the newlyweds have been married just 10, tying their knot tightly around each other and changing their world as a couple, just 10 days before our whole worlds changed — 10 years ago today.

the readings for today were about forgiveness, how when Peter asked Jesus how many times he was supposed to forgive someone who had wronged him, Jesus launched into hyperbole, saying seventy-seven (or seven times seven, depending on your translation.) and then He talked about the master whose slave owed him the equivalent of around a billion dollars in today's world. a price he could never pay back.

'we owe God everything,' the priest said. 'just because we opened our eyes this morning, we owe more than we can ever repay.'

i listened, waiting for the lesson about 9/11, and it was there, in the middle of all that need to forgive. how personal forgiveness, which is often the hardest, is based on the illusion that we might have had a better life if the person who had wronged us had not done so. and how as Americans living in a post-9/11 world, forgiveness is not so simple anymore. it was no accident, he said, that our lessons for today — of all days — were about this subject. chosen years in advance, this is just how God works.

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in the past week, my husband and i watched several specials about that Tuesday 10 years ago none of us will ever forget. it was harrowing to watch once again, as planes that seemed to come out of nowhere hit the Twin Towers and forever changed our lives as Americans. as i watched and listened to survivors and our nation's leaders tell their stories, i said a silent prayer that nothing like this would happen again.ever.

our daughter lives in NYC, and last week, she and her husband moved into a new apartment. her Upper West Side home is far away from Ground Zero, but as the anniversary of that day approached, i knew it is much on her mind. when i talked with her yesterday, they were staying home. traffic had been horrible since Friday, when the only news, it seemed was about a new, credible threat.


she was a senior in high school the morning of 9/11, and i was set to teach writing to members of her class later that morning. at home, preparing for the day, i saw the second plane hit in real time. then the Pentagon plane. it was almost impossible to pull myself from watching to get to my work. a little more than an hour later, after both towers had fallen, and as i walked up the steps to the high school, i listened to a silence so absolute I could not remember a time when my world had ever been so quiet. a man i didn't know came out of the building and we stared into each other's eyes for more than the split second strangers allow.

six months later my daughter and i visited Ground Zero ourselves with my best friend and her daughter. we stopped in at the office of one of my husband's colleagues, an Indian woman who told us the story of walking across the Brooklyn Bridge toward home and how it took hours to get to her little boy. 'the smell is gone,' she said as we stared into the canyon that still seemed to smolder. it was not gone. she was only used to it.


we were deeply moved awhile later by the thousands of fliers and bouquets of flowers posted on the fence that surrounded St. Paul's Chapel —the nation's oldest public building in continual use — which stands across the street from where the towers once stood. the minutia of the grieving, put there by families searching for loved ones missing when the towers fell. from September 2001 to May 2002, St. Paul’s opened its doors to firefighters, construction workers, police officers and others for meals, beds, counseling and prayer.

Doug Remer, a former associate rector at my church and a family friend of my friend Anne Boone,  was a relief worker at the chapel and invited us in. we knelt in pews where George Washington worshiped. we read some of the hundreds of letters lining every pew and wall, written by children from all over the world and sent to relief workers, thanking them for their service.

this is not something you ever forget.

+++++


the priest today said people have approached him in the years since 9/11 saying: where was God in this? why did God cause this to happen?  "i don't know what kind of God you believe in,' he said, 'if you think God caused it to happened." he did not believe in that kind of God. nor do i. i can tell you where God was. in every single fire fighter and police officer who entered that building. in the couple, as the priest reminded us, who jumped out of the burning buildings, holding hands, knowing this was something that could not be done alone.  there, in the community of strangers who huddled together for comfort, in elevators, in stair wells, on the top floors unable to get out, in those airplanes as their fuselages broke the windows of the towers, my God was there. 

i found myself weeping  — i can't remember a sermon in a long time that has made me weep — for the 3,000 souls gone, for the children of 9/11, for my daughter living in a city targeted yet again by terror. and closer to home, for the man sitting next to me, whom i have failed to forgive too many times, but who never fails to forgive me.

10 years ago, i had not yet met the friends that occupied my pew today. we were all in different places in our lives — Tim & Linda living in Birmingham, Lee and David living on base at Fort Bragg, NC. Lee had not even unpacked her belongings when David — who was supposed to be on vacation — came home to tell her he would be needed at work. (last week, as we recalled our 9/11 memories, several of us spoke of the quiet. Lee could not help thinking of how at Fort Bragg, there was no silence at all. just mayhem. 


within five years of 9/11, the six of us would be brought together by church, and as Tim said over dinner last night, our connection to each other has changed us all.

++++ 


after church we took a car ride to a beautiful little island and found a tiny church built in i think 1918, nestled in the pines and rocks, right by the sea. inside, i knelt, finally, and said my prayers, once again, for having safely arrived at this spot, on this day, with these people. for my children, husband, parents and siblings. for the world, and peace.

this afternoon, we sailed in 12-knot winds aboard a three-masted 60-foot schooner. i braced my feet against the side as we heeled, her rails almost into the chop, tried to take a few pictures. and i thought about how to connect all the moments of this day: the church, the priest's message, the friends, my marriage and this sail.

i thought about the small stained glass window of St. Columba's, depicting to me, Jesus calming the waters during the storm. "fear not' read the words in one corner of the small window.

i didn't know until just now this about the window: "the theme 'fear not'  was adopted  (by the church) soon after the tragedy which we now know as 9/11.  It also takes into account that we are a seafaring town. the touches of green signify the headlands of a safe harbor as the angel speaks peace from a bruised and stormy sky."

well. after 9/11, we are all bruised. thought it's a gift to be married so many years, sometimes it bruises use, too. as the priest said: God is in the midst of them. and us. in our lives and in our friendships, in our tragedies and our marriages. 

fear not. angels speak peace from a bruised and stormy sky.