Some panoramas you miss, for good reason.
This picture, taken by my husband, shows two of our kids (plus the omnipresent Rocky) on Franconia Ridge after a good climb. It was a spectacular day, and I was sorry not to be able to join them for it. I was alone in the car most of that day, driving back from Long Island where I had been engaged in a very different kind of activity with two brothers and a sister-in-law: sorting through stuff from our old home, encountering our parents once again while deciding on the fate of things they had saved for so long.
Since I was late getting into this game, having had to focus on our own move to New Hampshire this past spring, I hadn’t really known how much time to set aside for the remaining tasks at hand. Other members of my family had been working doggedly at it for weeks before. At first, three days seemed about right, and I was eager to get back north to see my daughter on break from her camp counselor gig. But, as it turned out, leaving at the end of the third day – with more blanket chests still to go through – became clearly not the right thing to do. Stay the course! Take hold of your heritage, even if a good hunk of it must be tossed out!
In a way, my mid-afternoon moment of decision-making was like the whole process itself: “Should I stay or should I go?” was akin to “Should this thing in my hand be put in a box to keep or a bag to trash?”
For years before she died, my mother had said to me when I visited, “Please look through the bookshelves and take some that you want!” With a car usually crowded with children and their stuff, and pressed for time to get on the road, I didn’t see the need to sit down next to those old and dusty volumes and choose any. Homes and Habits of Wild Animals and Vanity Fair in three volumes could wait. Last week, though, there I was – charged with the task of really discerning what should be spared and what not. What not, all right.
“Discernment” – there’s a word that comes up a lot in Episcopalian life. It’s about figuring out someone’s way maybe in the process towards ordination, about seeing the real truth in things. For me, at least last week, it was about how much to fill that big plastic garbage bag. Some of my father’s old and heavy law books ended up there, with a grimace, as did a bunch of my mother’s instructional golf books – to which she turned time and time again when she was about the age I am now. But I also saved some, too. About the last thing we need here in our new home filled with boxes is more boxes…but I will in fact be finding a way to incorporate a set of Jane Austen, another of Shakespeare, and a bunch of field guides with my great aunts’ names in them as well as books in the general category of “Nature.” It can’t be otherwise.
In Matthew 25, as my husband reminded me, Jesus does some heavy duty sorting of his own:
All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and he will put the sheep at his right hand and the goats at his left.
Now this takes real confidence – no dilly dallying allowed. And, with one group heading into “eternal punishment” and the other into “eternal life” the stakes are high. I’m glad there was no throne of glory to sit on in my old home while making judgments about a bunch of books. Oh, and there was the old china that had been put out in the shed; the dank smelling contents of all those big chests; plus the papers from years ago in my mother’s desk drawers, some in an envelope marked “Heartwarming letters and clippings.”
My brother spent hours going through our father’s old file cabinets, uncovering some treasures dating back to our grandfather and
beyond amidst the mostly now irrelevant documents. His old briefcase was found, all mildewed, but I decided to keep it. This thing had done a whole lot of coming and going of its own through the years, attached to his hand as it was when he did his daily train commute.
I am glad to have it, as I am also glad to have a photograph of my father casually bouncing a golf ball up on his club – something I saw him do so many times. Seeing the picture brings him back to me like a special delivery service.
This sweet little round desktop container, maybe once for stamps, with a dog lying on top also came home with me. My sister-in-law thoughtfully had set it aside, just knowing that it bespoke my mother.
And this statuette, one that had been next to our birdbath for many years, greeting walkers who came over the front field, is already on my new front stoop.
When I came back together with the hikers in New Hampshire, I was happy to hear about how glorious their day up high had been. I also felt eager – almost compelled — to tell them something about my journey back in time. Surely some transferring could take place, some passing on of understanding about what it used to be like, growing up where I grew up.
They listened for a little while, and then they started to doze off. Who could blame them, after Franconia Ridge?