Sarah's Sundries: February 2012

This one's quotable - it comes from the front of my sister Erin's refrigerator:

Family: a field to grow in. Children grow up, and parents grow patient.

I've thought a lot about that quote lately. The last six days have been long ones, Marie, Leah, Nathan, and now Willem all succumbing to influenza: high, sudden fevers, headaches, sore throats and coughs. In this house, for the first three, that means reactive airways trouble, too - wheezing, grunting and panting for air. There's been bawling, whining, vomit spewed across the rug, and night after night of medicating, steam-tenting, rocking, comforting, running for water, hankies, hugs. I tell you, this mama'd about had it. I started feeling like my name was a chant these four little bodies took up simply because they were feeling lousy and didn't know what else to do about it.

Family: a field to grow in. Children grow sick, and mama grows patient.

So last night, Sunday, I'm cleaning up the kid's special pancake plates (we don't miss a Sunday, even for the influenza) when Leah whimpers again from the couch, "Mom."

"Yo!" I beller back.

Silence from the sofa.

Will, who's helping with the dishes, turns to me with furrows in his forehead.

"Yo?" he queries. "What language is that?"

The light lingering longer, we eat supper with the shades still open, shadows stretching over the muddy fields. It’s while we’re waiting for Marie to finish her barbecued ribs, B.J. and I hiding snickers as she gobbles a bite and gasps for water – “They’re too spicy, Mom!” – that it catches my eye: a radio tower, due south, rhythmically flashing in the dusky sky. Suddenly I’m transported back to 13, Sunday night, and my turn to stay home with Gramps while the rest of the family visits at Grandpa and Grandma’s house in Rock Valley.

Gramps came to live with us a couple of years after Grandma died, following his fall on the bathroom floor in the middle of night and his having to army crawl to the phone to call my dad for help. Dad was insistent. Gramps would not go to the nursing home: he was going to live with us. “We already never get to go on vacations,” I whined to my Aunt Carlene. “Plus the living room’s the only pretty room in our whole house and now it’s going to be his room!”

But he came, his brown recliner stationed in the corner of the kitchen, and a hospital bed placed right in front of the big living room window that looked south over the apple orchard and the fields that he had farmed for years.

We head down the hallway after emptying his catheter bag. Gramps clutches his walker and I, the pastel gait belt wrapped around his waist. Step by halting step we make our way past the smiling line-up of our framed 5x7 school photos. Gramps is weary; I’m anxious to curl up with my book ‘til the rest of the family swarm home. Gramps makes an awkward three-point turn, and together we stiffly lower his lanky frame to rest on the edge of the bed. I undo the gait belt and, “Up!” he hollers as I swing his bony legs onto the mattress, cover him, and tuck his pillow under his neck just so.

“Shut the shade, Susie.”

Gramps always called us Susie, all of us girls. He grew bachelor’s buttons and snapdragons and watermelons like nobody’s business. He’d pop those big rattlesnakes open with his pocket knife, and we’d plant ourselves in the garden and eat them right there, the juice warm and sweet and running down our chins. He would let us ride Butterscoth the calf, Gramps leading ‘round the big corral with a makeshift rope bridle. We’d tumble around in the back of his brown Pinto out to the field to walk beans, him singing the Kirby Pucket song as we trudged along, and we’d haul him his lunch and lemonade when he disked, watching him as he took the first swig, waiting for him to come up for air and grin at us: “I can feel that all the way down in my toes!” We’d ride with him when he spread manure and help with sows that were having trouble in the farrowing barn. “That’s a way, Susie, you reach in there with your skinny arms. You feel it?” And I would feel it and pull out the limp pig by a leg, all that suction warm and wet the length of my arm. My Grandpa could come up with the square root of any number you’d give him in his head. And still today, when old preachers visit out this way, they all talk about my Grandpa, how wise he was, what an elder he made.

I tug the cord and the mustard-colored shade whirrs mostly shut.

“Too far.” I grab the other cord, and slide the shade open a few inches.

“That light, it always keeps me awake.”

“What light?” I move to the center of the window, peer outside.

“Don’t you see it? That flashing light out there?”

“The radio tower? Ah, come on, Gramps, that tower’s got to be six miles away. It’s all the way out by Rock Valley.”

“It keeps me awake.”

“Here. I’ll shut the shade a little bit farther…how’s that?”

“That’s good.”

“Alright. ‘Night, Gramps.”

“G’night, Susie.” I squeeze his hand and head for the hallway, turning off the light as I go.

“Susie?”

“What?” I sigh, turn toward him. I can see his hand, outstretched, silhouetted in front of the window.

“Here…you take this.” His shaky fist extends toward me. I reach out and feel paper between his fingers.

“Ah, come on Gramps, I tell you every time you don’t need to give me money.”

“You just take it. It’s only a dollar. You save it up and buy something pretty, O.K.?”

“O.K…thank you…’night, Gramps.

“G’night, Susie.”

It’s this that I’m thinking while Marie swooshes down the last bite of her supper, and still now, when the house is dark and quiet. I go to the living room window and pull back the shade. The light of the radio tower blurs. I think about moving come May, and all these places and people that I love still here when I’m not. I think about Dad saying, “My roots are here,” and feel a tug on my own heart.

The thing is, though, no matter how much my Grandpa loved this place, he loved the Lord more. He is one of that cloud of witnesses who looked for a house not built with hands, for the city that has foundations, prepared by God in that eternal heavenly country (Hebrews 12:1, 2 Corinthians 5:1, Hebrews 11: 10, 16).

Leah puts it well when we’re just about to close the meal: “I just don’t know how to say what I feel when I think about moving to Colorado, Mom. It’s happy and sad, all mixed together…”

“I know, my Leah.” I nod. “I feel the same way.”

“Here’s one good thing, though, Mom. I bet we’re going to meet more Christians there that we never knew before, and then we’ll know a whole bunch of God’s people out here and a whole bunch there. Won’t that be neat?”

“You know what’s neater still?” I query. “We’ll be with all of them in heaven forever.”

“You’re right, Mom!” Leah grins enthusiastically.

Now when I think about Gramps, the light blurring, and whether it’d be OK with him that we’re going, I remember driving away from the cemetery after Grandma died, Bethany bawling in the backseat that she didn’t want to leave Grandma behind. And I yelled at her, “Grandma’s not here! Don’t you get that?” And I think to myself, Gramps isn’t here. Don’t you get that?

Our former pastor preached it in his final sermon to our congregation, from 2 Corinthians 13:11: “Finally, brethren, farewell.” For the Christian, you see, it’s only farewell for a time. It’s only “God be with you ‘til we meet again.” It’s only “Mizpah: The Lord watch between me and you when we are absent one from another” (Genesis 31:49).

There’s no need to say good-bye…