He helped me dig out the garden. He hauled rocks and pulled a splinter out of my palm. He worked hard alongside his father and I for days to prepare this little corner of the yard. We stopped every once in awhile to sit and drink lemonade, then we’d pull out the seed packets of lemon cucumber and french radish and mammoth sunflowers to fortify us for the next round of digging. Just before we finished the third row, he stood and wiped the sweat from his brow, “So... this is what it means for man to try and get back into a garden,” he mused. “Mom, can you imagine how effortlessly enjoyable Eden was? How beautiful? My heart wish is to see it.” (After a morning of fart jokes this little musing bolstered my heart). Today he ran into the house on a wave of joy and wonder, “Mom!!! The corn!! The corn!! You can see little fluffy ears sprouting up! The zucchini flowers turned into zucchini overnight! Look, I got some more tomatoes and radish and the lettuce is growing and the sunflower is almost taller than me!” I smiled. “How do you feel?” He paused, “Excited. Happy. No, that’s not big enough. I feel like that thing you read us the other day from the farmer.” I nodded, “Wendell Berry.” He gathered the brilliant red cherry tomatoes in his hands and marveled at them. “Yes, that’s him. He said it was humility. That’s what i feel when I see a garden making and doing all these things that I cannot make or do.” 🌾 🌽 I watched him weeding with his little scythe just now, idyllic in the golden light but for the angry shouts of his brothers fighting over a frisbee game. I felt an overwhelming conviction to keep in wonder and humility, and to keep growing in character as we grow in our education. Without these things, we have only made education a weapon. What a gift this life of learning is. What a wonder.
Last week the boys had a glorious beach day with their friends. They ran wild for hours in the mangroves and caught crabs and jellyfish and a moray eel. They came home with empty bellies and hearts full of stories. When the last of their friends left, we gathered around the table and they filled their bellies and unleashed their stories. I loved being able to listen without knowing the ending- what joy! They asked “did you take any pictures today?” I confessed that I was busy enjoying my friends and had only managed to snap a few. “That’s ok,” one boy assured me, “I kinda like not having any. I think the picture in my heart is the real picture when it comes to adventure places and special worlds. If I grow up and see a picture of our place in the mangroves I don’t think I’d recognize it in the same way anyway.” I told him not to worry, his mangrove kingdom was safe. I opened my phone and pulled up a photo of the youngest perched on a fallen tree and showed it to him, “this is one of the only ones I took.” My youngest leaned in and narrowed his eyes, “That’s not right!” he said. “I was much higher and much taller and much braver.” His older brother looked at me, “see what I mean?” I thought about this conversation all week long and about my boys growing up with phones and tweets and messages covering nearly every inch of society. They’re largely separated from it and it’s given them the gift of knowing that just because we can take the picture or share words, doesn’t mean we should. A few days later we were discussing the chemical effects of technology on the brain and on human development and relationship. My eldest asked, “How many years before this crazy hunger for exposure and addiction to attention and information, develops a need for privacy, silence, contentment in humans? Has that ever happened in history? Or do we have to fight for it until the earth is restored? Do we have to go out and seek it?” he asked. “Like a secret mangrove hideout,” his brother said, “up to each person to reach out and grow together.” Oh, how good it is to grow together asking hard questions and seeking prudence together, to grow up hungry for community and kingdoms .
Today I watched my boys romp around the farm in a frenzied symphony of boy energy. Hopping fences, chasing cats away from cabbages, acquiring more dirt and sweat and memory with each lap around the back hollow. Their play weaving the boyhood stories they’ll be swapping as men over dinner some far off night while I listen, old and grey, to their retellings of the tale we lived together. It was an afternoon dipped in gold. Their long eyelashes, the broken gate, the weeds, even the sound of their laughter, all veiled in splendor. I prayed the prayer that’s been coming to my heart for weeks now. “Lord, let them grow up remembering faithfulness and love.” A few weeks ago I sat next to my Abuelo on Christmas Eve and answered the same question again and again. Each time he peered at me through the fog in his mind and asked, “who are you again? I’m sorry, I can’t remember,” I answered “It’s me. It’s Elsita.” Finally, I said “Don’t say sorry. The strength of your love helps me remember and it helps me remind you again and again of the truth. I love you and am loved by you. Don’t fret over names when you see our faces, just remember love.” He squeezed my hand and turned his face to watch my boys shaking star fruit from the tree nearby. The sound of ripe stars and memories fell onto the grass all around them, echoed back to us. Have they yet grown into the awareness of what it means to grow up loved? Abuelo sat watching them, forgetting more and more, grasping at memory, while they gathered more stories into their hands and hearts. He is a man who did not experience much love in childhood but who loved ferociously anyway. They brought the star fruit to him. He held it in his hands. Young and old marveled together over the gold miracle of a star you can eat. They soon slipped away, back to the tree, back to building their stories. The one who grew up without but choose to give abundantly, keeping watch over the ones that now grow in the abundance of that love, quietly gazing at what his love built. I watched him and found the end of my prayer, “Lord, help me choose faithfulness and love. Help me remember so they can remember.”
The night before Thanksgiving, we got the news. The baby we had been hoping to bring home in a few days, was not to be ours. We sat our four boys down to gently break the news, to cry our tears, to answer their many questions. Yes, we would put away the baby clothes. Yes, we would cover the crib again. Yes, we were going to keep waiting. Yes, Adoption is hard. Yes, we are so deeply thankful this baby has a family. We circled in together and grieved with gratitude. (Our part in her story blessed us. We got to PRAY for her and her birth mom. What an honor it was to do that. Even if she ultimately went to another loving family, we are so thankful we got to be a part of it). The day after Thanksgiving, I thought about the next few months of our lives, the months I had briefly believed would be full of diaper changes, washing bottles, lullabies and helping a baby in the grief of losing her birth mother. It’s hard to navigate the shifting landscape of our imagination as hope and sorrow flow back and forth. I vascillate between just doing the next thing, taking the next step, and needing to lift my eyes to the distant future to remember where it is I’m headed, lest I slowly drift far off course one small step at a time. This next week I am writing small pieces of our family vision down on my calendar, one small piece per day. Then I am choosing one small thing to do that day that meets the vision. One small step in the right direction, while we take time to mend. There is mercy in the fact that this happened on the doorstep of advent. My prayers have been very short these last few days. Three small words whispered over and over again, “I trust you.” I say it with confidence because He always keeps His promises. My heart hurts, but I trust Him.
A glimpse at boyhood. Tougher than hickory wood, more fragile than a butterfly’s wing, faster than a firefly. At least, that’s how he described it yesterday before he called down from the treetop, “how many years of warriors and trees and poems do I have left?” A decade ago I was scraping my knees raw in daily prayer over this bright eyed little toddler that climbed the tallest furniture, poked forks into electrical outlets and bit babies in the church nursery. I spent my days either snatching him back from impending doom or battling the molten fury of his toddler tantrums. It was hard to stay mad at him since he inherited both tendencies from yours truly. Today I watched him knit in his grandmother’s chair. I saw the cuts and scrapes and bruises on his legs, testimonies of trees conquered and races run. His sandy hair lifted with the breeze that floated in from the window while his fingers practiced a tarantella in the circles of yarn. No one ever assumes that I am his mother. When he was a baby, strangers would see his milky white skin pressed up against my brown skin and they’d name me “Nanny, maid, babysitter.” But he called me “mama” and today he is wearing my shoes. I am thinking about the contrast of our skin and the compatibility of our hearts when he calls me to attention. “Mom? I was just thinking that I don’t have to measure years running out on me. Childhood isn’t losing years. It’s building them. Just like you told us.” His legs dangle and quiver with pent up energy when the words drop before me. He is holding on to the hope that his thoughts are true. “Yes. It’s not sand running out of the hour glass. It’s sand piling up. I’m so thankful I get to see it,” I affirm. He nods then changes subject quickly, asking if he can make cookies before lunch. An hour later I’m yelling out the window “Do not climb on the roof!” I am learning that those danger cravings take more than a decade to mature into healthy risk taking. He races toward the back hollow and into the wooded cathedral to whisper his prayers and continue building what very few can see. He is wearing my shoes.
