I was awake earlier than I needed to be on this Sunday morning but I was ok with that.  It gave me a chance to talk, this new day and I, to our common Creator.  I moved slowly in my kitchen, the year-long white Christmas lights strung around the ceiling simmering warm hues.  The girl slept upstairs.  The snap of the glass carafe told me the water was heated and I poured it over my coffee and breathed in the steam.  I have my grandfather’s chair in a corner of my kitchen.  I got it for him at a yard sale in his neighborhood in Illinois years ago when I was visiting him.  He replaced it with the one he already had in his living room because it was easier for him to get out of, his arthritis making his thin frame stiff and uncooperative.  It sat in the same spot for years.  I have a picture of my two oldest children, one still in diapers, sitting on it.  When he died, it was the one thing of his I wanted.  There is not a single time I sit in that chair that I don’t think of him.  Not one.  This morning was no different.  I sat in silent memories, content with the sound of silence, grateful for the heritage I have in grandpa.

Right about then, I heard a sound that I couldn’t recognize outside and I pulled the curtain aside.  My eyes surveyed the yard.  Nothing to see.  Curtain dropped.  Then, there it was again.  I peered beyond the curtain again and saw a black choreographed whoosh of black in the sky and grabbed my camera and ran for the front door.

 

I stood in the center of my yard, overwhelmed by the symphony of birds in every tree I could see playing tag, swiring and dancing in the sky, calling to one another and, it felt like, to me to join in.  The noise level rose as other flew in to join them on posts and pillars.  And then the Conductor of it all stepped up to the podium to usher in the magnificent crescendo.  The sun illuminated the clouds with cotton candy colors and the bells in the church steeple down the street began to gong, gong, gong……!  I felt like Cinderella at the ball.  I tore myself away to run in the house and up the stairs to tell my sleeping girl to wake up, wake up, wake up!  I didn’t want her to miss it!  LOOK!  LOOK! I gasped to her as she came to the door, half awake and nodding compliantly before she turned and crawled back under the covers.  I felt disappointed.  I wanted her to seize the moment,  this moment that would never come again, to get that, really get it and hug it hard so she could remember later when this morning’s creation performance is long gone and she may be sitting in my grandpa’s chair remembering one day without me and smile.  But, she’s a brand new 19 and sifts things through youth and hormones and morning sleepiness and seemingly endless days.  She hasn’t fully grasped the gratitude moments like sprinkles on ice cream.  She hasn’t seen the first scrapings of the bottom of the dish yet that tell her to savor it slower and more intentionally.

The girl goes back to bed and I go back outside and the sky’s canvas was waiting on me.  It had another parting gift before the day took hold.  I stood and looked, the colors and clouds forming a visual surround sound.  Coram Deo, I said out loud to the Lover of my soul;  living before the face of God.