All Scattered About

The only art class I've ever taken was a hurried plunge into ceramics that lasted three weeks.  The final week of the course, a friend said that she liked it when our professor asked me to explain my pieces because I saw the world in symbols.  I realized she was right.  My responses to the professor weren't as much explanations of my clumsy art as they were fumbling attempts to translate private symbolism into a common tongue.

Another way I process the world is through words. John won me with a string of them that led straight to his heart, I read and sing them to our children, I feel the urge to plunk them out here from time to time, and they rattle around my head throughout the week, grouping themselves into phrases and sentences that never form an orderly line, let alone make it to paper or screen.

Over the last few days, I've come to myself with a start, realizing that for who knows how many minutes, I was composing a poem in my head that no one will see.  Poems about all that can't fit into a space of two weeks, poems about an ermine in the freezer and piles of notes on a microwave and bottles of peppermint, poems about a jug of cold water on a wood wagon and my father's camouflage hat.   They wink in and out, barely begun and quickly forgotten, but they're a silent salute to my Dad and a way for me to untangle things too large to understand.

I've never liked November, but this year, the landscape is a perfect counterpoint.  September's bustle of birds and insects, that riotous color of October-- all have slowed into long, bare stretches of sky and a span of quiet. 

The girls and I just got back from doing animal chores for my parents.  We fed, watered, and walked Ruger.   We fed and watered Mr. Brutus.  We rounded up the escaped horses, moved their sly bones back into the pasture without mishap, and slap-dash mended the fence.

And my heart was so full.  I don't understand the human condition.  I don't understand the tangled web of family and its immutable bonds.  I don't understand death.  I don't understand the resurrection of the body.  I don't understand forgiveness and grace and love-- oh, such great Love.  These are too large for me.  But, yet, I do understand.  Their truth shakes my bones and their presence brings peace.

My Dad starts chemo treatment tomorrow in a city three hours away.  My thoughts and prayers are with him and my mom.  I find myself walking around the house, too distracted to remember why I'm walking.  The tears suddenly dropping into my salad surprise me, because I didn't realize I was crying.

The statistics are impartial: a 20% chance that the short course of treatment will send his weak body onward to his waiting Father; a 50% chance of it doing little or nothing, in which case, he will come home to us to die.  The other percentage is what we hope and pray for, but God is above all of these.  If he chooses to gather my father in His arms before then, there is peace-- a reservoir of peace and so much gratefulness for what He has given our family in the last week.

And then there's my youngest sister Debbie, who seems to take the hay-strewn thoughts out of my head, and orders them beautifully.