I run my fingers along the wood’s soft, molded grain. It already bears nicks and crevasses. I’ve buffed the pencil points and scrapes into history as I’ve sanded and waxed even in these first few months.
These months have stretched and stressed my soul. The uncertainties beyond my walls have moved me to be impatient with my little beauties, to be exasperated with their childish demands and scuffles, typical though they be.
Any worry or fear I have buried has been pulled to the surface.
As a young woman, I was able to surrender this desire to control and move my future to the foot of the cross. Once I even sat upon the same rocky crag my great-great-grandfather rested on as he gazed across at the ocean, towards the new country he was forced to make his new home, and thought I could make a similar sacrifice, giving those choices over to my Beloved’s judgment.
Yet, somehow, as I became a mother, I began to pull those threads back into my fist. I desire, I need to hold these strands in my hand – to make sure they are secure for my children to always grasp, wherever they wander.
But it is not my privilege to hold those strings.
I could not even imagine how to weave this tapestry of life we traverse.
It is up to Him to hold those threads, that he may tug them when my little loves need a reminder…when they journey in a way I cannot see and experience things of which I’m not aware…
One of my greatest heartaches is not being able to give my children a home to come back to. Certainly, there is ever a place for them in my house. Yet, when I need to retreat – mentally or physically – I call to mind the stream where my grandfather proposed to my grandmother behind my family’s homestead, the woods I would run through to visit my grandma and clean her house, the pond at my family’s camp where I would pray morning prayer, and that distinct smell of dying and wet, crimson autumn leaves as my feet crunch along a country gravel road.
I am blessed to live where I have the deepest friends and a beautiful land to mark with memories but where, financially, we cannot forge a similar home for our children without a different economic landscape. The houses are new; they are expensive, and the region is divided into cities, developments, and no-man’s land.
That ancient setting, where your roots sink not only into your family’s heart but the soil and season as well, is absent.
This loss was called to mind recently, with discussions that certain settings of my childhood memories might eventually be sold. Part of me wonders – will my children know that they are being ever pulled towards a heavenly home – a home they will one day enter and recognize as their beginning and end – if they don’t have that experience now, of a home to leave and return to? I am the child of Wendell Berry’s Hannah Coulter.
And how will I ever ground my children in what is beautiful, what is loving, what is good, if I cannot give them a physical place that represents all these truths since I have abandoned it and not yet forged a new representation of it?
How will they recognize they are called to a lasting home when their surroundings are marked with an ever-deepening circle of lies, lockdowns, and loss? When their home shifts constantly?
But in the midst of all this mask-wearing and restrictions, we had this beautiful, hand-made wooden table delivered. As I told my husband, this could be the table we sit at during holiday gatherings for the rest of our lives, at the moment when our daughter tells us she’s bringing her fiancé here to meet us, at all the hours of homework and folding laundry…And as I sit here, sorting pictures for our yearly photo albums, I’m struck anew by a softly recurring realization. Homes I’ve admired are currently burning in a local wildfire. My childhood dream home may never be an actuality; my actual childhood homes may join misty visions of the past. But home is not just a place. Especially in this world. Home lies with and within a person. My present little abode and my entire story is part of a much greater one, and the ultimate storyteller is already writing our next chapter. His Sacred Heart has been the refuge across the ages for all those who have lost homes to fires, wars, oppression, and poverty.
Even should this heavy altar I rest on crumble, he offers another one to return to – whether accessed in a church sanctuary, a spiritual communion, a Facebook livestream, a grace whispered to the aching heart.
He owns the loom. He holds the pen. His hands, which cup the lives of those I love, are home enough to remind us of what is true, what is lasting, and where we will rest.
My call is simple: to dance across the tapestry and remind my children of the joy of home.
O come, O Dayspring, from on high, and cheer us with thy drawing nigh!
For all these gifts and all these days, we thank You.
