Call Your Mother, or Grandmother

Slowly adjusting my sense of time to the hours at hand here, like a massive ship trying to turn in one direction or another, but with Shlomo the engine boy refusing to cooperate. Meanwhile, the children accommodated themselves immediately and are careening around, enjoying the fine weather, and being told every three seconds to go outside. And then to shut the door. But not to bang it.

I am trying to wildly and swiftly read some old sermons and letters and comb through my grandfather’s carefully assembled genealogical records. I’m related to the Bruce’s, and Buchanan’s, and Swedish Carlson’s, and autocorrect insists I have apostrophes in all of those auspicious names even though it feels so wrong. The long letter from one great great great grandfather Bruce to his son, warning him against the Covenanters, is fast and lose in comparison to modern spelling and grammar and it makes me long for that bygone happier time.

Today there’s going to be a fancy tea party and lots more family. I have to bathe the children and repack my bag. One small child has taken everything and spread it all over this vast back room that is so comfortably and pleasantly sheltering us from the elements. And I need to trim some hair. Some of the children look like…well…they aren’t ready for a fancy tea.

I’m so grateful to get to be here and spend these few days. Life is so fleeting, so terribly brief. One breath and then it’s gone. I’m so grateful for my grandparent’s good health, their life long careful attention to diet and exercise, their patience with me that it’s only taken me seven years to come see them.

When you’re locked up in the ordinary roundabout of life, battling back the tyranny of the urgent, not being drowned by the unrelenting waves of having to produce meals every day multiple times a day, trying not to fail at school and church and life, it’s very hard to wrench away from the myopic preoccupations of the moment to consider that Life Is Short. Taking a moment to stop everything and go a far distance to see people is not only desirable, it is really necessary. I hope when I’m fussing around in my kitchen, tripping over my own feet and unable to hear at all, my children will drop everything and come see me. I’m even prepared to use guilt and manipulation to make them do it.