She has already said "yes" to the dress.
A big event for my family each Spring and Fall is a barn sale in the neighborhood. All the children love to accompany me there, where we manage to find treasures we never knew we had longed for all along. Right now, from this morning's round, I still have a trestle table jammed in the minivan, which will be repurposed as a sewing table. Jonathan has a talking, Diego-themed, magna-doodle toy, that helps him to identify twenty animals. I bought him a handsome little sweater, and found a set of steel knitting needles to use in my knitting, and some old-style cookie cutters that I envision as decor for my kitchen. Also, the ubiquitous, vintage handkerchief purchase, because of the lily-of-the-valley embroidery.
My fifteen-year-old daughter bought a wedding gown. It has been waiting there for her, for two years past, and every time she has come away from fondling its satin, and regretted leaving it there. She is a hope chest kind of girl, and finally I told her, "If the dress is still there, and you have the money, it is there for you, sweetie. Buy it, already!"
I watched her excitement, as she chose (with help) the champagne-satin gown. Then she left it there, and made the rounds of the barn interior, probably to avoid appearing too anxious to have it. I took it from the rack and showed her how to drape its length just so across her arms, so as not to trail it on the floor or trip over the train. For ten dollars, we brought it home.
And of course, she tried it on. Wouldn't you know, it fits. There is just a bit of room for rounding out in the figure, but aside from a little hemming work, and replacing three covered buttons, which I can do with remnants from the shortening, it is perfect. After a cleaning and a pressing, she will be the bride of her dreams.
And that breaks my heart wide open, for two reasons. Firstly, that my daughter, my first-born, the one whose birth was an especial agony, is dreaming of leaving one day. She thinks of being married, of making a home, of having children, as a good thing.
Secondly, because I do not know how she could so esteem marriage, as she witnesses her daddy and her mama go through it.
When I stood up with Jeffrey, when we both stood up before the minister, the vows we made did mention that there is a scope of experience, there is a gamut to be run, in a lifetime committed to another person. We promised to love and be faithful, for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, in plenty and in want. What we had then, was a failure to believe in worse, or sickness, or want. And so we were unprepared: how can you imagine such things, when you are all dressed up with your family and friends, when everything is written in calligraphy, covered in flowers, adorned with ribbons and set to organ music?
Do we believe in love everlasting at that point? Sure, but it is just theory.
Ask my daughter what she believes in, and she will tell you what I have trained into her from God's word: that love is a matter of making choices in behavior, sometimes minute by minute. That God is love incarnate, that to have the slightest idea of how to love another, we have to be in love with God, the source, first. I tell her, that love isn't the "feelies" you get for a season, it isn't a sensation, and often it is in fact an opposite reaction to something really objectionable. You need so much strength, to love a human being in spite of his humanity, both when it is better and when it is worse, through good and bad, when you have plenty of time to be together and when all you want is some private space.
I know, that in her mind, this gown stored away in anticipation anchors her hope, brings it that much nearer. I am humbled, seeing her so happy about having settled that detail. Evidently, observing us has not put her off the ideal of wedded bliss. I know she sees our struggles. I know she roots for both of us to come around. I know she pities, and she prays, and still she believes. She does.
The Bible teaches us that beauty is in holiness, and that it works from the inside out. But there is something of holiness, too, in the beauty of an ideal that is undamaged by its surroundings. In Hannah's case, she is clinging not only to her confidence in God, but to her confidence in the goodness of His plan for her, and His ability and willingness to bring it about. She is already a beautiful bride-to-be, and I have something to learn from her.
Saturday, April 28, 2012
Monday, April 23, 2012
Hometownless
A friend of mine wrote a memoir. It was published, and he has launched himself on a 6-month tour to promote the book. Stop #17 was a small college town just up the road from where we were schooled, and the event drew an enthusiastic hometown crowd that included old schoolmates and teachers.
Ben read from his work, choosing the sections of special relevance to Poolvillians, Sherburnites, and Earlvillians. We shared many a laugh over the recounted escapades of youth that some had shared and others had always wanted to know better. After the reading and signing, and visits with people who had been the movers and shapers of my school days, I began to read Ben's book in earnest. He had his reasons for writing the memoir; I had my reasons for reading it. Some things I have found both on the pages and in myself as the reader have been unexpected. One such is the central role of place. And especially, the role of places we belong and their contrast to the places we pass through.
Following the prose of Ben's childhood haunts, I went back to a time when I felt very keenly the lack of familiarity with such places as his hamlet neighborhood, the absence of anything to explore that had been made and abandoned by men of long ago, the ritual of meeting places with friends outside of school hours. I had none of this practice interacting with the world of informality. Even now, I am shy of entering the tangle of traffic, people, and noises which is the 50,000-populated city nearest me. Navigating that web of cross purposes raises my blood pressure and heightens my sense of being a foreigner to the 'normal' scheme of things. I am unable to blend in: I know I stick out as I cling to my purse and my children, urging the older ones to keep a grip on the younger ones.
But I believe I have figured out now, the root of my discontent in that context: I never had a hometown.
My dad had a dairy farm because he would not have a job, and he and my mother set out purposely, to raise my brother and me with a certain "otherness." (In my opinion, this had to do with vengeance against their own respective origins and upbringings.) Part of the strategy was to make sure we knew where we belonged...and where we didn't.
So we were farm children - not, children who merely grew up on a farm - and our chores increased with our ages and statures. The fact we were needed so integrally was my parents' justification to restrict our after-school and between-school term exposure. We both took ballet training in a big pharmaceutical town 30 minutes away, with other students who were mostly from that school system, but apart from that, we did not do much of anything that would forge any ties with the communities where we went to school.
While schoolmates joined cub scouts or brownies, pop-warner football or wrestling or cheerleading, I went home and did homework and chores. When in school my classmates traded lunchtime accounts of the Earlville roller rink or the Sherburne ice cream spot, I kept still about my ballet lessons that made me even odder that red hair and a funny name did. At home, the only escape was in books, and for years and years I believed I was the only one to read for amusement, not just for assignment. In the junior high years I admitted to myself that I didn't really belong to the "set" that shared my classes, and I felt ever more isolated as the country girl who wasn't allowed to babysit or go to after-school band camp. Instead, I milked cows with the hired boy and spent my summers unloading hay wagons and having less time to read more books.
The books, at least, afforded a semblance of someplace else to go: if only imaginary, it was somehow possible to be an English governess, an American pioneer, or a French scientist. In others' pages I could pretend at empathizing with Queen Guinevere, Marguerite Blakeney, or Athena, goddess of wisdom. But none of these were real, and they'd never had a real place, any more than I.
By the end of college, I knew my purpose, but not my place. To keep busy, to get off of the farm, and to pay the student loans, I took a job at a small business based in Earlville. This was the tiny village where I had gone to elementary school, and where my mom had gone to work as director of the public library. By age 22, I could conveniently run errands at any number of Earlville's businesses, but I did not really know the place. I finally got a chance to do so, as I took up walking for exercise.
I walked the "three-mile block," a route that began from the lone traffic light and outlined the rectangular quadrant between North Main, River Road, and West Main, until I owned that route and others that varied my routine. I walked all over every side street there was, getting to know Abbott Avenue, School Street, Green Street, Fayette Street and all of them. I liked absorbing the seasons and sights, smells and sounds of a true "small town" where most people knew most people, where niches were defined yet did not confine, were predictability provided security. It was only as a young college graduate marking time, that I was able to join a community: attending a church, taking a role there as teacher for the junior high Sunday School, starting a youth group and helping with the Vacation Bible School. I took out a post office box, ate antipasta salads from Phil's Pizza, browsed the Treasured Memories gift shop on rainy days, and enjoyed performances at the historic Opera House on East Main. From walking, I came to know where sidewalks were crumbling or buckling, so intimately that I could go surefooted even as darkness fell. In the three-and-a-half years of learning Earlville, I came to know faces of people who had been living in the houses I passed by in the big yellow schoolbus. The homes of my fifth- and sixth-grade teachers, my physical science teacher, my elementary gym teacher, and high-school drama teacher became familiar landmarks. An elementary music teacher and several elementary teacher aides, my chemistry-physics teacher, and my Spanish-French language teacher were also there. So much that had shaped me had come from Earlville.
Just as I was beginning to look for an apartment that I could afford, I met the man I was to marry, and moved away to live near his hometown, a good forty-five minutes from Earlville. After three and a half years we resettled at our present farm, and life is again structured around our own microcosm. This time, it is by choice, but we consciously maintain ties for ourselves and our children outside of the farm, enough to provide regular variety and so reinforce our preference for the country life. In this way, I feel sure, our children will appreciate what they have, desire it for their own futures, and also be at ease in different venues as needed.
I am a country girl at heart, a farmer's wife to the core, and "I go to the hills, when my heart is lonely." But now I also have a hometown. It came to me late, and filled a period of life that otherwise was one of turbulence. For a little while, Earlville was the sort of fulcrum that ordinary people recognized, and it blessed me with the solace of blending in a bit, both in space and with my fellow man.
Ben read from his work, choosing the sections of special relevance to Poolvillians, Sherburnites, and Earlvillians. We shared many a laugh over the recounted escapades of youth that some had shared and others had always wanted to know better. After the reading and signing, and visits with people who had been the movers and shapers of my school days, I began to read Ben's book in earnest. He had his reasons for writing the memoir; I had my reasons for reading it. Some things I have found both on the pages and in myself as the reader have been unexpected. One such is the central role of place. And especially, the role of places we belong and their contrast to the places we pass through.
Following the prose of Ben's childhood haunts, I went back to a time when I felt very keenly the lack of familiarity with such places as his hamlet neighborhood, the absence of anything to explore that had been made and abandoned by men of long ago, the ritual of meeting places with friends outside of school hours. I had none of this practice interacting with the world of informality. Even now, I am shy of entering the tangle of traffic, people, and noises which is the 50,000-populated city nearest me. Navigating that web of cross purposes raises my blood pressure and heightens my sense of being a foreigner to the 'normal' scheme of things. I am unable to blend in: I know I stick out as I cling to my purse and my children, urging the older ones to keep a grip on the younger ones.
But I believe I have figured out now, the root of my discontent in that context: I never had a hometown.
My dad had a dairy farm because he would not have a job, and he and my mother set out purposely, to raise my brother and me with a certain "otherness." (In my opinion, this had to do with vengeance against their own respective origins and upbringings.) Part of the strategy was to make sure we knew where we belonged...and where we didn't.
So we were farm children - not, children who merely grew up on a farm - and our chores increased with our ages and statures. The fact we were needed so integrally was my parents' justification to restrict our after-school and between-school term exposure. We both took ballet training in a big pharmaceutical town 30 minutes away, with other students who were mostly from that school system, but apart from that, we did not do much of anything that would forge any ties with the communities where we went to school.
While schoolmates joined cub scouts or brownies, pop-warner football or wrestling or cheerleading, I went home and did homework and chores. When in school my classmates traded lunchtime accounts of the Earlville roller rink or the Sherburne ice cream spot, I kept still about my ballet lessons that made me even odder that red hair and a funny name did. At home, the only escape was in books, and for years and years I believed I was the only one to read for amusement, not just for assignment. In the junior high years I admitted to myself that I didn't really belong to the "set" that shared my classes, and I felt ever more isolated as the country girl who wasn't allowed to babysit or go to after-school band camp. Instead, I milked cows with the hired boy and spent my summers unloading hay wagons and having less time to read more books.
The books, at least, afforded a semblance of someplace else to go: if only imaginary, it was somehow possible to be an English governess, an American pioneer, or a French scientist. In others' pages I could pretend at empathizing with Queen Guinevere, Marguerite Blakeney, or Athena, goddess of wisdom. But none of these were real, and they'd never had a real place, any more than I.
By the end of college, I knew my purpose, but not my place. To keep busy, to get off of the farm, and to pay the student loans, I took a job at a small business based in Earlville. This was the tiny village where I had gone to elementary school, and where my mom had gone to work as director of the public library. By age 22, I could conveniently run errands at any number of Earlville's businesses, but I did not really know the place. I finally got a chance to do so, as I took up walking for exercise.
I walked the "three-mile block," a route that began from the lone traffic light and outlined the rectangular quadrant between North Main, River Road, and West Main, until I owned that route and others that varied my routine. I walked all over every side street there was, getting to know Abbott Avenue, School Street, Green Street, Fayette Street and all of them. I liked absorbing the seasons and sights, smells and sounds of a true "small town" where most people knew most people, where niches were defined yet did not confine, were predictability provided security. It was only as a young college graduate marking time, that I was able to join a community: attending a church, taking a role there as teacher for the junior high Sunday School, starting a youth group and helping with the Vacation Bible School. I took out a post office box, ate antipasta salads from Phil's Pizza, browsed the Treasured Memories gift shop on rainy days, and enjoyed performances at the historic Opera House on East Main. From walking, I came to know where sidewalks were crumbling or buckling, so intimately that I could go surefooted even as darkness fell. In the three-and-a-half years of learning Earlville, I came to know faces of people who had been living in the houses I passed by in the big yellow schoolbus. The homes of my fifth- and sixth-grade teachers, my physical science teacher, my elementary gym teacher, and high-school drama teacher became familiar landmarks. An elementary music teacher and several elementary teacher aides, my chemistry-physics teacher, and my Spanish-French language teacher were also there. So much that had shaped me had come from Earlville.
Just as I was beginning to look for an apartment that I could afford, I met the man I was to marry, and moved away to live near his hometown, a good forty-five minutes from Earlville. After three and a half years we resettled at our present farm, and life is again structured around our own microcosm. This time, it is by choice, but we consciously maintain ties for ourselves and our children outside of the farm, enough to provide regular variety and so reinforce our preference for the country life. In this way, I feel sure, our children will appreciate what they have, desire it for their own futures, and also be at ease in different venues as needed.
I am a country girl at heart, a farmer's wife to the core, and "I go to the hills, when my heart is lonely." But now I also have a hometown. It came to me late, and filled a period of life that otherwise was one of turbulence. For a little while, Earlville was the sort of fulcrum that ordinary people recognized, and it blessed me with the solace of blending in a bit, both in space and with my fellow man.
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