The open hand of God
Someone asked me what was the most important day of my life. And I couldn't stop thinking about it. Was it the day I married my husband, or the day I met him, or the day weeks before that when I finally told myself I was ready to give my heart away? Was it the day my son was born, or every day since then when he wakes up and smiles at me, or the morning when he's no longer here, and I finally realize how good that part of my life had been.
Each memory becomes an endless chain of pictures, like pearls strung from the limbs of trees in the yard that I can't reach the end of. How do we know what day is important and which one is not, especially while we're in them, and maybe never? Until finally the only day I could think of is not a single day, but a kind of day, the kind of day I'd lived enough times that the memory of it comes back in one complete picture.
It was the day when a load of peas would come from the field, mostly the scraps of vines, too small to send to the canning factory in town. We fed them to the cows. Except some of those days my father would find a vine intact, and pull it from the truck for us, a treasure of fresh pods, waiting to be split and the peas eaten.
We sat on the lawn on a big terry beach towel that my mother had sewn, my sister and me, the pile of vines between us, our pixie haircuts wet from the pool. We sat, like lilies of the field, and picked through the vines for the best pods, until the breeze had dried our matching cotton sun suits, pulled from a box sent by some distant relative we had never met with daughters who wore clothes of unimaginable finery, and the sun had warmed the goosebumps from our arms enough to go back into the water. We marveled at our fortune.
It is the picture of everything I need. How could anything be more important, that memory of warmth and food and clothing, that plenty for which we did not worry, or expect? What greater moment than the one lived in the open hand of God?
Each memory becomes an endless chain of pictures, like pearls strung from the limbs of trees in the yard that I can't reach the end of. How do we know what day is important and which one is not, especially while we're in them, and maybe never? Until finally the only day I could think of is not a single day, but a kind of day, the kind of day I'd lived enough times that the memory of it comes back in one complete picture.
It was the day when a load of peas would come from the field, mostly the scraps of vines, too small to send to the canning factory in town. We fed them to the cows. Except some of those days my father would find a vine intact, and pull it from the truck for us, a treasure of fresh pods, waiting to be split and the peas eaten.
We sat on the lawn on a big terry beach towel that my mother had sewn, my sister and me, the pile of vines between us, our pixie haircuts wet from the pool. We sat, like lilies of the field, and picked through the vines for the best pods, until the breeze had dried our matching cotton sun suits, pulled from a box sent by some distant relative we had never met with daughters who wore clothes of unimaginable finery, and the sun had warmed the goosebumps from our arms enough to go back into the water. We marveled at our fortune.
It is the picture of everything I need. How could anything be more important, that memory of warmth and food and clothing, that plenty for which we did not worry, or expect? What greater moment than the one lived in the open hand of God?
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