So many thoughts…

So many thoughts. So much to think about and write about. Finally a place and time to write the thoughts. The ten day old baby is sleeping and so is his mother. His father is getting the car serviced and his sister is at her school. Grandpa is working on a floor project. Meanwhile Gram finally got dressed, made some phone calls, washed the dishes, straightened up odds and ends — so easy in someone else’s home — put the diapers on a second round of washing, and began to consider lunch. God’s in his heaven; all’s right with the world, as Mr. Browning noted.

This is some of the beauty of being a grandparent in the young family’s home. When there are peaceful moments, the moments are deep and rich. I guess it seems that way because we know how to notice and appreciate them. I recently read Geneen Roth’s This Messy Marvelous Life. I loved the book and the perfect title. Oh yes. I thought of that the morning after a particularly loud and unhappy middle of the night, with a three year old in total collapse…loud collapse… joined by her little brother crying out. In our own bed, we grandparents sent out quiet love to them all, as the parents tried to soothe both children and make the rest of the night workable, which of course, they did. The episode certainly didn’t seem marvelous at the time, and even messy seemed too small to describe it all. But stepping back the next morning, I fully got it. The middle of the night upheaval was part of this amazing, messy marvelous life. What a gift to experience. The children expressing that they had some needs, the parents looking for ways to meet those needs and finding ways, even the grandparents being able to be sleepy witness to a glimpse of the part of a former life they had known long ago. How beautiful. Nothing was wrong. This is life: messy, and marvelous even when it’s messy.

Some other thoughts I’ve been having are about now being in the 4th quarter of my life, starting my 76th year. I’d already written the profound awareness I had about having lived three quarters of a century. I was not prepared, however, when on the day of my birthday, a picture of a doorway popped into my mind. The door, slightly ajar, I knew opened into this 4th quarter. I didn’t know, however, what was through that doorway, on the other side. I did know that something good beckoned me. I felt curious and satisfied, thinking that was quite fine enough as a birthday present. Then a few days later after some pondering, suddenly the doorway was gone. Instead before me was a vast open space, open for me to enter, to explore. What was I going to do with this vastness of the 4th quarter, however long or short it might be? What did it offer me? What was I willing to expand into? Truly, I was simply filled with joy… and am again as I think of this.

In my physical world, I began the 4th quarter with clearing out closets and the Hiding Places of Things in my house. It did mean living in chaos for a while, but for me, the progress has been wonderful. As often happens in this kind of process, I happened to unearth a photo of me I’d forgotten. I am 33 years old in the photo, sitting nursing my second child, while in this present that second child was about to have her second child. What touched me about that photo was the peaceful, quiet happiness on my face. I had not remembered that I felt that way at that time. Such a sweetness to the photograph. We had moved into a partly unfinished house two days before the baby was born, and this must have been not much after. The mantle was not done on the fireplace, I can see, and I do remember frequently sitting in the rocking chair to nurse my baby in the middle of furniture pushed to one side of room while someone was hanging wall paper or doing the finishing carpentry with baseboards or quarter round…

I don’t know where my three year old son was when this picture was taken, nor do I know who took the picture. That was 42 years ago, when I was nursing my baby in an unfinished house, and obviously felt contentment in the moment. What a treasure to unearth this memory in the clearing of Hiding Places of Things. The picture stays with me. Maybe there is more for me to learn from that young contented woman. Maybe she has some key to this 4th quarter ahead. In the meantime, I’m going to heat up some chili for Grandpa’s lunch, and fix Gram’s lunch of cut-up chicken, a corn muffin and apple, a lunch I particularly enjoy. We’ll sit down and eat our lunch in this quiet house in which for now my baby and her baby sleep. It’s easy to see and feel how marvelous this all is. That young woman in the photo I found couldn’t even have imagined it all… but then, she was enjoying the marvel of her own stage of life, wasn’t she?

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