The more I grow, the more I realize that the biggest events in my life were only discernible after many years had passed.
The ceremonies, the official moments of recognition, required attendance...those are not what changed my life, or made me who I am today.
Some of my clearest moments, were
uneventful...but binding, and lasting, and huge in my own tiny life.
Standing in front of my mother, as she sits in a big chair, and feeds my baby brother...she says, "Hold out your hands. That is your left hand, and that is your right. Always." And I got it! It stuck! And today in my mind I stand in front of that chair and hold out my dirty, sticky little six-year old fingers for a mental moment, and I remember.
My father hands me a hatchet, and puts my hand right at the curve of the handle, and swings my arm, stopping at just the right point. "That is where you release it. See? Do you feel it?" and I do. I try it myself, and the hatchet flies and flips through the air and hits the wooden stump on its stand. I can do it! The neighbors teach their children to play baseball, but my father teaches me to be strong, and to be accurate, and to be different...and I love it!
Riding a bicycle down a country road, young and silly and hopelessly in love, and waiting for a sign, just any little sign, that this time it is not my imagination. It is real. It is forever. Please, God! And he smiles as we stop to rest. He tells me about the birds I can hear, and shows me the wheat, and what it says about our weather, and he gives me the countryside as a gift...and then I know.
Two little hands grab mine. They are dirty, and they are precious, and they are trusting...so trusting! "Mommy, I picked you this flower. It's beautiful." Yes it is, the most beautiful Dandelion in all of creation. And I place this event on the shelf with all the others. And I cry.
